/.github/loop/PRIORITIES.md

Priorities

The ranked work queue for the autonomous improvement loop. The architecture-review pass (the architect) owns this file: each run it turns the roadmap plus an internal scan (gaps in the services → agents → workflows lifecycle, API coherence, drift, tech debt, test and DX friction) into a single ordered list — highest-value first — and links each item to a tracking issue. The hourly continuous-improvement pass works the top item whose issue is still open. So the architect decides what, and the increment loop builds it.

Reading / editing. An item is done when its linked issue closes (the increment that builds it adds Closes #<issue>). Roadmap phase (Now → Next → Later) is the primary ordering; internal findings are interleaved by value, not kept in a separate list. The human can reorder this list — or the issues — at any time to redirect the loop; direction always wins.

Off-limits to the loop (the architect proposes these as notes, never as queue items the loop can auto-merge): brand/positioning copy, breaking public-API changes, architectural rewrites. Those go to the human.

Work queue (ranked)

1. Stabilize AtlasCloud agent conformance guarded delegate check (#4007) — #4009 closed the prior top streaming gap (#3903), and there are no open codex PRs currently carrying builder work. The remaining open Now-phase item is the live-provider conformance seam: AtlasCloud/minimax must reliably exercise the same guarded delegate refusal as the other provider paths without weakening the assertion. This protects the green-CI evaluator that keeps the loop trustworthy and prevents provider-specific behavior from drifting away from the services → agents → workflows contract.
2. Trace agent runs as OpenTelemetry spans (#3908) — the README, website, and recent blog story now align around the operational harness: services become tools, agents are services, flows handle the deterministic paths, and developers should be able to scaffold → run → chat → inspect → deploy. With first-agent wayfinding, no-secret harnesses, and streaming now represented, the next highest-value developer-visible seam is observability: RunInfo steps, tool calls, delegation, status, duration, and failures should correlate to spans while defaulting to no-op when tracing is not configured. Seeded by Claude Code from the roadmap + open issues; thereafter maintained by the architecture-review pass.