The processes
A map of stages says what ought to happen. It does not say who holds each one, what they are handed, what they must give back, or what to do when a step fails. Three of these stages are written down to that standard, in the Agent Processes format, and an orchestrator reads them and runs them.
Each document names the phases in order, the agent or person who holds each one, the file that passes at every handoff, the ways a phase can send the work backwards, the rules that stay true whatever happens, and what is worth measuring afterwards. They are kept at agentprocesses.ai rather than copied here, so there is one version of each rather than two.
Making a new agent
A request in words becomes a running agent. Nine phases: six held by agents of the lifecycle, three held by the person who asked. The spec phase settles four things before any shape is drawn, and two of those can end the run before anything is built. Five named deviations send the work backwards, because the spec you approve is rarely the spec you first read.
There is no separate process for changing an agent. A change to a released one is this process run again, with the change in words and the version that runs today attached as the prototype.
It has run end to end once, on 15 September 2026.
Recording an incident
An agent goes quiet, or a job fails. The process builds a timeline of what is known from the platform's records and the agent's own, attributes every fact to where it came from, and marks the gaps as gaps. It never guesses a cause and never proposes a fix.
Nothing holds the first phase yet. Until something watches for an agent going quiet, a person has to notice first.
Retiring an agent
Stopping an agent is easy. Retiring one is not: the address has to stop answering without breaking whatever pointed at it, the records have to outlive the thing they describe, and somebody has to decide whether the name is released or held. The process says who decides each of those and in what order.
It is written. Nobody has run it yet.
What is not written down yet
The stages this map marks as unheld have no process either, and the two are the same gap seen twice. A stage gets a process when what it is given and what it hands back are both artifacts, so review, security review, eval, rollback and cost are unwritten for the same reason they are unheld: nobody has settled what passes at the handoff. The handoffs page shows where the chain breaks.