In Progress

Key Ideas

• Claimed Work: in-progress means active work is owned by a node.
• Observable Execution: the work should expose process, agent, logs, and evidence as it advances.
• Recoverable Interruption: interruption should leave enough state to retry, resume, or reassign.

Purpose

In-progress exists to make active work explicit. A Gap should not disappear into an agent turn, terminal command, or hidden process once work begins.

Expected Role

In-progress should connect the Gap to node ownership, workflow claims, process execution, agent activity, target-app context, and evidence. Other nodes and agents should be able to see that the work is already active and avoid duplicating it.

If an in-progress run fails or is interrupted, Refine should preserve what happened and decide whether the Gap returns to todo, moves to failed, or follows a recovery path.

What Happens

When a Gap is in-progress:

• A node owns the active attempt.
• Refine records the workflow claim, provider or actor, target app, and execution context.
• Agents use guidance, governance, tools, files, terminal/process execution, and target-app lifecycle context to act on the work.
• Process output, logs, changed files, agent output, and intermediate evidence should remain observable.
• Other nodes should not silently duplicate the same active work.
• On success, the work should produce a reviewable handoff and move toward ready-merge or another appropriate next state.
• On interruption or failure, Refine should preserve evidence and route the Gap to retry, failed, or recovery.

Future Direction

Future in-progress behavior should support richer concurrency controls, leases, partial progress, cooperative multi-agent work, and stronger recovery semantics while preserving clear ownership.