Initiatives

What an Initiative is Advanced

An Initiative is the process your team already follows, written in a file in the repository: the stages in order, who does each one, what blocks, and where a person approves. CanvasCode reads that file, draws the process and conducts the runs.

The app doesn't implement anybody's process. What executes is still the commands, the scripts and the agents the project already has. The file is a lens over them, and if it and the commands disagree, the commands win.

The vocabulary

Word What it is
Initiative The defined process, in a file inside the repository
Run One execution of that process, from start to finish
Step One stage: an agent or a command, with what goes in and what comes out
Gate A command that proves the step's result is good enough
Review A step whose output is a verdict, and whose effect is changing the route

What it is for

For work that repeats and has an order: a content line, a release flow, an investigation that always goes through the same five stages with an approval of yours in the middle.

It isn't for a one-off task. To ask an agent for something, the way is still their panel or your voice.

What changes compared with sending the work yourself

  • The order doesn't get lost. Each step receives what the previous one produced, plus a summary of up to three lines with what the artifact doesn't say: the risk the agent saw and the decision they took.
  • What says the step is done is the gate, not the agent. The agent says they think they've finished; the app runs the command that proves it, and if it fails the work comes back with the reason.
  • Whoever reviews is always a new agent, because reviewing your own work with the conversation still in your head is the weakest review there is.
  • Whoever fixes is the same agent on the first round, and a new agent from the second on.
  • Every loop has a ceiling. And an artifact identical to the previous round's stops right there, without spending the next round.
  • No agent gets called without you choosing which one. Every button that talks to an agent opens the picker first and shows what is going to be sent.

Where the files live

  • The Initiative lives in .codecanvas/iniciativas/ inside the repository, and is versioned with the code: it travels to whoever clones the project.
  • The runs live in .codecanvas/runs/, outside git: they are execution, not definition.

One Initiative belongs to one repository. It is made of that project's commands and scripts, and it isn't reusable in another one.

What can happen in parallel

Inside a run, everything is a queue: one step, one agent, one input, one output. Parallelism exists one level above, in two runs of the same Initiative at the same time, to compare results.

Where to go next