Steps, waiting, and sign-off

Every step in a plan says who does it and what it is waiting for. And no step counts as done until someone approved it and its checks passed. When a step is the owner's, the owner finishes it with one button.

At a glance

Where you see it

The Office: an agent's sheet (The step it is on, Your steps) and each row of the Roadmap.

What powers it

The milestones and signoffs tables, the plan door in logbook.py (its done gate), inventory.js (the Mark done button).

When it runs

Every time anyone tries to mark a step done: the agent, the page, or a person at the box.

The Office · Ada's sheet

The step it is on

Draft the sign-up page

The agent drafts, you approve

State: next · Approved by Sam

[ ] signoff by Sam: no signature yet

Also on the plan

Book the room

The agent's step

done · Mar 6

Send the invite email

Yours to do for now

Waiting on guest-list from priya.

Your steps

Write the class outline

Yours to do, the agent hands you the facts

How do you know it's done?

I finished it Friday and put it in the shared folder

Say yes to the menu

Yours to do

Example screen with made-up data.

Where you see it

Open an agent's sheet from its row. The step it is on shows the step, who does it, what it waits on, and who approved it. Your steps lists the steps that are yours, each with a Mark done button. The same button sits on your steps in the Roadmap.

Who does each step

Every step carries one of four labels. The page says it in plain words.

Label	The page says	What the agent does
owns	The agent's step	Does it and checks it.
drafts	The agent drafts, you approve	Writes the draft. The owner approves and sends.
you	Yours to do, the agent hands you the facts	Gathers the facts under it and asks. Never does it.
not-yet	Yours to do for now	Same as you. The owner has not done it enough times to hand it over.

A step with no label tells the agent to ask the owner for one. The labels come from the delegation tree.

What happens, step by step

1. A step can wait on a person or the world. Its state turns waiting, with who it waits on ("the cafe") and a date to nudge them.
2. A step can wait on other steps. Its blocked_by list names steps that must be done first. A name like guest-list is a step in the same plan. A name like priya:guest-list is a step in another agent's plan. The page shows it as "Waiting on guest-list from priya."
3. A step is ready only when every step it waits on is done and its time has come. If a named step does not exist yet, the answer is "not ready", never a guess.
4. Before any step can be done, someone must approve it. Only a name on the agent's stakeholder or approvers list may stamp it. The agent's own name is not on that list, so it can never approve a step it added itself.
5. A step labeled you or not-yet is the owner's to finish. If the agent tries to mark it done, the door refuses and tells it to hand over the facts and ask.
6. A step can have one to three checks. Each is a number, a fact, a quality bar, or a sign-off by a named person. The logbook checks sign-offs and quality bars itself. A number or fact check is written down for the agent to verify, but the logbook does not run it.
7. A sign-off is a signature row, not a checkbox. The named person signs. If that was the last thing the step needed, it turns done in the same moment. A signature can be withdrawn, but only with a reason.
8. The owner finishes their own step with Mark done. Tap it, answer "How do you know it's done?" (for example, "I sent it on Friday"), and tap Save. The step turns done. Your words are added to its note as "Done: ...", so the agent reads them next wake.

Mark done will not save with the box empty, or finish a step nobody approved. In that case it says so in a sentence, and names who may approve it.

What powers it

Part	What it does
milestones.who_does	The label on each step: you, drafts, owns, or not-yet.
milestones.blocked_by	The steps this one waits on, in this plan or another agent's.
milestones.approved_by	Who stamped the step, and when. Only the approve door can write it.
signoffs table	One row per signature or withdrawal. The latest row per person counts.
may_mark_done in logbook.py	The one gate every path to "done" goes through.
PlanMarkDone in inventory.js	The owner's Mark done button, shared by the sheet and the Roadmap.

Why it works this way

Why the gate sits in the door. If one path to "done" checked the rules and another did not, the second path would be the one that got used. So there is only one path, and the check lives inside it.

Why the owner's steps are walled off. An agent was once handed a whole workshop after the owner had run it only once. The booking steps went fine. The class outline, invitations, and follow-ups "burned weeks of chat and never got good," because there was no pattern yet to copy. Now those steps are labeled as the owner's until the owner has done them a few times.

Why one approval covers a whole plan. The owner approved a plan and then was asked to approve every step again, one tap each. The owner said: "it doesn't make any sense for an entire onboarding to be approved and then the client has to go back in and approve every step all over again." Now signing the contract stamps the plan. Only steps the agent adds later need their own stamp.

Connected to

• Plans and the Roadmap: the states and the rail.
• Teams and handoffs: steps that wait on another agent's step.
• Decisions waiting on you: where an approval or sign-off reaches the owner.
• The delegation tree: how each step gets its label.