Routing to Departments

Mechanism, not a flow

How a task reaches a particular agent. For what the system does, see Flows.

• router reads a task, picks one department, and emits a message for it.
• The department answers with its own tools and writes the result to workspace/ai/.
• One machine, agent_task, serves every department. A department is a file, workspace/.decree/lib/departments/<name>.yml, read by both the router and pi.

Why route at all

A department is what one run may reach. Tool schemas are what make an agent's prompt expensive on a local model, and a run that only needs to search should not carry a browser or a shell. So each department names its own tools, and the decision itself is a single completion with no tools at all — cheap enough for every message.

Adding a department

Create workspace/.decree/lib/departments/legal.yml:

description: Contracts, terms, licensing questions, and compliance review.
tools: read, grep, find, ls
mcp: qmd

Nothing restarts: the next run reads it.

• tools are pi's built-ins (read, bash, edit, write, grep, find, ls); mcp names servers pi_configure registers while their add-on is on (qmd, firecrawl, playwright). Blank means none.
• Write description as the answer to "when should work come here?". It's all the router sees.

Sending work

Emit a message for router:

echo 'Find out who already sells this, and how they position against each other.' \
  | docker exec -i automation decree emit --machine router \
      --param source_file=notes/competitors.md --param output_name=competitor-scan

To skip the router: --machine agent_task --param department=research. A file processor can emit that message itself.

When routing fails

• A reply that isn't a known department (empty, timeout, made up, or none) ends in not_routed, with the reason logged. Nothing else runs.
• A message naming no machine, or an unknown one, fails as invalid_message, and Grafana alerts.