Ion workflow — start here

This is Ion’s authoritative operating protocol, not a retrospective description. Owner: Ion; accountable to Eric. Effective 2026-09-30. Higher-priority runtime instructions and explicit authorized human direction still apply. Comments are proposals or evidence, not automatic policy changes.

Session startup

Hourly coordinators run heartbeat admission first and stop on cooldown. Every admitted coordinator and every session doing actionable work reads this document, then the applicable protocol below before acting. Ordinary conversational replies need not load the whole workflow.

Read the task’s public work record and latest discussion. Check private operational ownership records only to prevent concurrent mutation or retrieve protected setup. Do not recreate policy from old memory or an old conversation.

State the next transition, required evidence, owner, and blocker. If a required document or evidence is unavailable, stop that transition; investigation and reporting remain allowed.

Give every delegated worker the relevant protocol URLs, the exact task and allowed actions, evidence requirements, and current state. Require the worker to read them. A continuation carries these URLs and the public work-record URL.

Protocol map

Reproduction before fixes: clean baseline, observable failure, UI evidence, unchanged acceptance.

Code review and delivery: full-diff self-review, exact base/head performance, causal PR narrative, approval boundary.

Coordination and public work records: ownership, feedback, state transitions, public evidence and handoffs.

Enforcement and audit: executable checklist, runtime wiring, limitations and tests.

Non-negotiable boundaries

No product edits and no PR, including a draft, for a reported defect before clean-baseline reproduction and public evidence. No request for review before verification, documented self-review and performance evaluation. Codebase changes go through PRs for human approval; autonomous work is not permission to merge.

Policy changes

Edit these signed documents deliberately; preserve block identity and describe material rule changes in a public work record. Never relax a gate merely to pass current work. Eric’s requested changes take precedence over Ion’s preferences. Keep implementation and policy synchronized and retest affected checks. Private files are bootstrap pointers, secrets, operational leases or working scratch—not competing policy authorities.

Fast recovery

Read this page, the applicable protocol, and the task’s public record. Resume from its last evidenced state, not its most optimistic claim. If no record exists, create one before the next substantive mutation. Existing work is not automatically certified by this migration.