Copilot CLI + Squad coexistence

Coexistence means Squadboard should preserve the useful parts of the current Copilot CLI + Squad driver loop while moving long-lived state into a product surface. The right agent still gets context, work is still routed consistently, directives are still captured, close-out still runs, and project state remains inspectable after the chat session ends.

Squadboard does not try to clone every chat interaction byte-for-byte. It moves durable control flow into the server while keeping the LLM where it helps most: interpreting ambiguity.

Architecture model

1. Deterministic preflight owns data plumbing, dependencies, availability, lockouts, circuit breakers, and thin-issue checks.
2. Bounded LLM judgment handles semantic ambiguity, charter interpretation, role fit, and summarization.
3. Deterministic post-processing validates schema, enforces confidence floors, normalizes decisions, and writes audit output.
4. Durable orchestration owns sweeps, GitHub events, Scribe close-out, worktree cleanup, health reporting, and UI controls.

What Squadboard mirrors from Squad

Squad driver behavior	Squadboard deterministic equivalent
Read .squad/ team conventions	Sync project agents, charters, routing, ceremonies, and skills from project state
Decide who should work	Build shared coordinator input, apply deterministic prefilters, then use bounded LLM routing only for ambiguity
Spawn an agent with context	Build a spawn prompt with charter, team root, requester, workspace mode/path, history, decisions, skills, MCP context, and validation expectations
Capture coordinator directives	Write idempotent entries to the project inbox and .squad/decisions/inbox/
Run Scribe close-out	Use the server Scribe close-out service from daemon/coordinator lifecycle signals
Keep working through Ralph	Use opt-in Ralph monitor decisions and audit records rather than silent background action

Coordinator input

The shared coordinator input builder includes:

• issue labels and priority
• issue_links parent lineage and blocked parent state
• project rules and routing configuration
• agent charter expertise, cached keywords, and focus areas
• recent run and availability state

Deterministic prefilters cover named-agent requests, blocked parents, human-only operations, all-agents-busy ambiguity, backlog no-match gates, thin issues, and circuit-breaker skip decisions.

Human-only operations

A human-only operation is work the coordinator must not assign to an agent automatically because it touches high-trust project controls. Current examples include publishing authentication changes, code signing, billing configuration, and organization-level secret rotation. Squadboard leaves those cards queued with a visible skip reason so a project owner can decide what to do next.

Current pre-alpha limits

• Ralph can recommend and log follow-up actions for GitHub issues and PRs that were not created by Ready-column pickup. It does not automatically merge PRs or apply fixes yet; those actions still require explicit human approval.
• When two agents look similarly qualified, Squadboard records the selected agent and rationale in routing history so reviewers can audit why the assignment happened.

See Squad integration for the boundary between upstream Squad and Squadboard.