Pattern 2

Classify-then-act, not ask-then-wait

Status: superseded, August 2026. The two-hourly agent that ran this loop was retired, and Pattern 14 replaced it as this workspace's way of handing work to an agent. The classification below still holds wherever the mandate is already unambiguous. Discovery is the half that failed, and Pattern 14 says why.

Problem. An autonomous background agent has two failure modes: it nags for input on everything, or it acts confidently on tasks it doesn't understand.

Pattern. Classify every incoming task first: has-default (an obvious correct action exists), needs-intent (genuinely ambiguous), or out-of-scope. Build the has-default work speculatively in a sandbox, lodge it for review, and act only on approval. Log every rejection as a short decision record the agent greps before classifying anything similar again.

Why this beats the obvious. A pure question-queue stalls on the user. A pure autonomous loop ships things you didn't want. Classification routes each task to the safe handling, and the rejection log stops the same bad idea coming back next cycle.

Cost. A sandbox, a review queue, and a rejection history to maintain. The agent does speculative work that sometimes gets discarded.

Where it lives: samples/scripts/heartbeat/classify_task.py and samples/tasks/HEARTBEAT.md.

Seen in 1 of 8 teardowns · Practise: learn/06