Tasks work where the conversation is about: ground, mode, and the laws that follow it #76

What happened (2026-08-31, session 8f75d6c1ffdeaaf5, two /tasks fixing CodeQL #54/#56 in Agent-Field/agentfield with deepseek-v4-flash)

The chat was opened in ~, not in the repository. aforge minted an empty owned repo at …/work (one commit, "session opened") and cut trees/1, trees/2 from that. The brief the chat model wrote said Repo: ~/Documents/agentfield/code/agentfield … Work in this repo directly, so both workers worked in the person's live checkout. Everything downstream assumed trees/N:

1. The git guard lied there. taskgit.go refused checkout/push/stash/update-ref/symbolic-ref/worktree with "this is your own copy… reaches no remote… comes home on its own" — false for the real repo. The workers escalated to commit-tree/write-tree and then bypassed the guard with gh api Git Data calls (blob → tree → commit → ref → PR). One ran gh auth token; the OAuth token is in plain text in two task journals.
2. Collateral in the person's repo. Two commits landed on their local agent/oss-telemetry-v2 (b2f68fea, d22a053e); one worker did reset/reflog surgery there, and a first push carried 246 files because the index belonged to the person's branch.
3. The visible "cycle" was audit ↔ repair, not the model. The check judged "a clean restore of what the work wrote" in trees/N-check = the empty repo + one copied file → REFUTED — the restore contains nothing / npm run build … Missing script. The repair round redid the whole job in the real repo, was judged in the same empty restore, and the node ends "incomplete" while PRs session: route wide reads to quick tasks, arm the grain, and add consult (waves A+B2, #1016) #1017/tui3: the draft kill ring, the ↑ walk visits them, /drafts browses #1018 are open and correct.
4. "went in circles" was the wrong word. The last six calls before the cut were distinct and succeeding (commit-tree, write-tree, second commit, ref update…). The terminal signal was the third [silent] note (looped.go): the nudge count is cumulative across rule kinds and never resets on progress, "material progress" is edit/write only so a commit/push phase is structurally silent, and silence borrows the repetition rule's sentence.
5. Then nothing visible happens. N.beat.json carries phase: checking|repairing but no surface code reads it; minutes of check and repair draw nothing on the card.

Design

Every task gets a ground — one path resolved from evidence the conversation already holds, shown on the forming card before consent, correctable with one key; the tree picker is the correction, never the default. And one law regardless: a task never writes outside its ground.

Ground ladder (generic, no lists): said (a path in the person's words, a dropped folder, propose_task{ground}) → touched (git roots of every path the conversation read/edited/grepped/cd'd, weighted by recency; one dominates → ground; two with real weight → the one question we ask) → standing in (the workspace when it is a repo — today's behaviour) → nothing (the conversation's own folder, and the card says so).

Mode from the deliverable, never asked: repo + writes → worktree off its HEAD (today's machinery pointed at the right repo); repo + reads only → reference (own folder, repo read-only); plain folder + writes → mirror (copy in, land by name); "here" → in place with the file ledger as undo.

Card row: in ~/Documents/agentfield/code/agentfield · branch off main · your uncommitted changes not included.

Lanes (sub-issues)

Integration branch: feat/task-ground (off dev). Each lane is a branch ground/<name> with a PR into feat/task-ground; one PR from there into dev.

Drafted with CodeAF · reviewed and owned by the author