Best practices

This page grows as we learn

A wider study of roles, planning and research practices is in progress. Until it is done, this page holds only the rules that follow directly from how Minga works today. Advice on when to add agents for areas, or which autonomy level to use when, will come with that study.

1. Keep the brief short and current

Lea, every other agent and every worker read the brief at the start of every turn and every run. A short, true brief steers every one of them; a long or stale one costs context and points them the wrong way.

• Keep each of the five sections to a few lines. The limit is 8,000 characters; aim well below it.
• Put project-wide decisions there as they happen (“Not doing: Android in 2026”), and long specs into the milestone they belong to.
• Keep How to build and test exact: the real commands. Workers use them, and item checks are written from them.

2. Give every item checks for done

No worker starts an item without at least one check, and a worker’s done claim is accepted only with the evidence its checks ask for. Checks are what Lea reviews against and what a validator re-runs.

• Prefer checks a command or a person can verify: “xcodebuild test passes”, “a screenshot of the welcome screen on an iPhone SE”, “Sam approves the copy”.
• Add a person’s check where you want to judge the result yourself (designs, copy, anything you would otherwise redo). It gives the item a review, with the outputs to pick from.
• Checks are frozen when the first attempt starts. If they are wrong, ask Lea to revise them rather than letting the worker work around them.

3. Use Next for review and Now as the go-ahead

Nothing under a milestone in Next starts, so Next is the place to read and shape the breakdown. Moving the milestone to Now is your approval of its spec, and work starts at once.

• Let Lea break a milestone down while it is in Next. Read it on Plan › List or the Canvas, change what is off, ask for changes in chat, and answer the open questions under it.
• Then move it to Now. Keep the number of milestones in Now small: the work, the reviews and the cards all come from there.

4. Keep a machine online for overnight work

Workers run only on runners that are online, and an item waits (“waiting for a runner”) while none is. A laptop that sleeps also ends the runs on it. If Lea runs on that laptop, she is away too.

• Pair a Linux box or a VPS as a second runner, with the service installed and lingering on (sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER), so work keeps moving while your laptop is closed.
• Give it the same CLI setups and the repo (see Pair a runner and Attach a repo).
• Consider letting Lea think in the cloud with a workspace API key, so she is never away. See Choose where Lea runs.