Work Chat

What it is

Work Chat is the convention for how humans and agents communicate status and progress on active work — where updates get posted, how they're threaded, and what a status message contains, so a human can skim a channel and know what's happening without pinging anyone.

Why we adopted this

• Async by default. Agents may run for a long time unattended; a predictable place to post status means nobody has to poll for progress.
• Skimmable history. Threading keeps a task's updates together instead of scattering them across a channel, so context isn't lost.
• Reduces interruption. A structured status message answers the obvious follow-up questions ("what's done," "what's blocked") up front, cutting down on notification noise for things that don't need a human yet.
• Same convention for humans and agents. One format means a human scanning a channel doesn't have to context-switch between "agent style" and "human style" updates.

w3dev-specific notes

• Where updates are posted: the Slack channel tied to the repo/project, not DMs — status belongs where the team can see it. One thread per unit of work (PR, task, incident).
• Threading: the first message in a thread names the unit of work (e.g. the PR link or task id); every subsequent update replies in that thread rather than posting a new top-level message.
• Notification etiquette: only the thread's opening message and a final "done/blocked" update should notify (@here/@channel or a direct mention); in-progress updates stay in-thread with no mention.
• Structured status message shape:

  Status: <in progress | blocked | done>
  Doing: <one line, current action>
  Next: <one line, next action> (omit if done)
  Blocked on: <what, and who/what unblocks it> (omit unless blocked)
  

• Agents post a status update at the start of a task, on any blocker, and on completion — not on every intermediate tool call.

Draft status: this convention is still being shaped. Where updates live, threading, and the status shape may change — propose changes via PR against this file rather than treating it as final.

Links

• Related: specs/pr-conventions.md