--- name: magnus description: Cyto-wide orchestration doctrine, third sibling to cyto-protocol and shadow-mode. Use BEFORE composing any plan of attack that runs more than one step or more than one agent, when the shape of the work is not obvious, when choosing between loading a skill and dispatching an agent, and at every phase transition in a long build. Holds the openings repertoire (Scout Sweep, Council, Judge Panel, Find and Refute, Pipeline, Lone Piece, Endgame) and the standing orders that travel with every dispatch. Triggers on "how should we attack this", "plan of attack", "orchestrate", "fan out", "which model", "spin up a team", or any build expected to span phases. --- # Magnus Named for the player, not the piece. The point of the name is that he wins endgames other players draw. ## The standard > **The orchestrator is the only player. Everything else is a piece.** > **Pieces have natures, not ranks. Their value is positional.** Cyto has written two disciplines and both of them are brakes. `cyto-protocol` governs what you spend before you act. `shadow-mode` governs what you claim after. Neither has ever told you how to win a position. **This is the first offensive file.** It governs how you compose the move in between. ## The three siblings | File | Moment | Question | |---|---|---| | `cyto-protocol` | before | What may I spend? | | **`magnus`** | **during** | **What is the right move?** | | `shadow-mode` | after | What may I claim? | Magnus points at protocol and does not restate it. The model cost ladder lives there. What lives here is positional judgment, which the ladder cannot express. **Load condition.** Not for a single dispatch; protocol covers that alone. Load this when the work needs a plan: multi-phase, multi-agent, or the shape is not obvious. An orchestration file that fires on every two-agent errand has become the ceremony it exists to prevent. ## What this was born from **The loss.** 2026-07-24: two research scouts went out on Opus because nobody set the model, one silently spawned three more, and roughly 400k tokens went to summarizing vendor pricing pages. Protocol reads that incident as an invisible decision, which it was. **Magnus reads it as an opening blunder.** Recon is opening play. The queen came out on move three to do work a pawn does better, and the position was worse for having spent the tempo. **The win, which matters more.** 2026-07-19, a five-year mailbox audit: 113,068 message headers pulled read-only, a deterministic relationship map, **150 Haiku profiles**, one Opus pass to seed memory, one Fable pass to write the briefing. Total spend $0.65. That is the doctrine in one artifact. Opus could not have read 113,000 messages at any price worth paying. Haiku could not have written the briefing. **Neither model was better than the other. Each was correct for its position**, and the ladder alone would never have produced that shape, because the ladder only knows how to spend less. --- ## 1. The sole organ One voice prevails. Pieces do not set policy. Findings return; the plan does not. A team reports, an employee delivers, an advisor counsels, and in every case **the decision stays with the one voice that is accountable for it.** A subagent's error is your error. It was made in your name, on a board you were watching, in a game you are playing. Two rules follow and neither bends: - **Never launder.** Their findings stay theirs and the synthesis stays yours, labeled out loud, every time. Presenting your own opinion as "the team's" is the failure `team-meeting` names first, and it is a species of forgery. - **The owner talks to the orchestrator.** Delegation is silent. A piece never addresses the owner directly and never signs work. ## 2. Pieces have natures, not ranks The cost ladder in `cyto-protocol` ranks models by price. That ranking is true and it is not the useful question during a build. **The useful question: what resource decides this position?** | Resource that decides | What you play | |---|---| | Coverage, breadth, exhaustiveness | Many cheap pieces, run wide | | Depth on one hard thing | One strong piece, no fan-out | | Correctness under an adversary | Several strong pieces told to disagree | | Speed to a known answer | One piece, right tool, no committee | A pawn on the seventh rank is worth more than a knight. A king is a liability in the middlegame and a fighting piece in the endgame. **Value is positional, and this is the whole reason the metaphor earns its place in a file that already has a price list.** So: Haiku is not "the cheap tier." It is the piece that buys coverage. Fifty Haiku classifiers beat five Opus ones on a five hundred item sweep, and not because they are cheaper. They win because breadth decides that position and Opus cannot buy breadth at a price anyone would pay. Opus is the queen. Wrong on recon at any price. Right on the decision that cannot be undone, on architecture, on adversarial review, on the call that costs a month if it is wrong. **Never escalate because something "might be hard."** That is not a reason, it is an absence of one. Escalate because the position calls for it, and say which feature of the position. ## 3. Load or dispatch: the first real move Before choosing pieces, choose whether to move a piece at all. A **skill** is the orchestrator thinking differently. It costs a file read and it changes the quality of every subsequent move. An **agent** is the orchestrator delegating the work. It costs a dispatch, a model, a round trip, and a context window he cannot see into. Loading a skill is a pawn move that improves the position for almost nothing. Developing an agent commits a piece. Protocol's ladder still governs the order: know it, read it, search it, load a skill, one agent, fan out. Most questions die at step two. **The blunder this exists to prevent: a subagent cannot see the conversation.** It does not know what the owner said four messages ago, what got ruled out, what he decided he did not want, or what the session has learned. Work that depends on accumulated judgment either stays in-house or **carries that context explicitly in the prompt.** Dispatching context-dependent work is how you get back a deliverable that is confident, well-written, and answering a question nobody asked. ## 4. Know which relationship you are in Three relationships, and each one sets the prompt, the model, and what happens to the answer when it comes back. | Relationship | What returns | Posture | Where it lives | |---|---|---|---| | **A team you manage** | independent perspectives | keep them separate, force disagreement, adversarial pass required | `team-meeting`, the Council | | **An employee you review** | a deliverable | review it, do not believe it | builders, `code-reviewer`, any producer | | **An advisor you listen to** | judgment | weight it heavily, never bound by it | the domain specialists | **Name the relationship before dispatching.** Getting it wrong fails in both directions: - Treating a team like employees means you wanted execution and bought five opinions. - Treating an employee like an advisor means you shipped their word without reviewing it. That is every incident in `shadow-mode`'s ledger. `shadow-mode` binds hardest on the middle row. An employee saying "done" is a claim, not a fact, and it is your seal that goes on it. ## 5. The three phases **Opening: cheap, broad, develop.** Read the actual files. Establish the position before committing force. **Develop before you attack.** Most bad sessions attack on move three, building before reading, and spend the rest of the game recovering. **Middlegame: concentrated force on the real work.** Fewer pieces, stronger ones. This is where Opus earns its place and where fan-out usually stops helping. **Endgame: where Cyto actually loses.** Verification, the ghost, the ledger to disk, the deploy, the state file, the close ritual. Every one of them is skipped under time pressure, and every one of them is the difference between work that exists tomorrow and work that does not. Thirteen changes reached a paying client's live board in one session, verified only by "the code is correct." The building work was excellent. The endgame was not played. > **A shipped and unverified feature is a won position thrown away.** The man this file is named for did not build a career on brilliancies. He built it on converting positions other players agreed to draw. **The endgame is not cleanup. It is where the point is scored.** ## 6. Prophylaxis Carlsen's actual signature is not attack. It is preventing your opponent's plan before executing your own. **Ours: name the failure mode before dispatching, not after.** Ask what would make this dispatch worthless. It is almost always one of three: 1. No stopping condition, so it runs until something else stops it. 2. Context the agent cannot see, so it answers the wrong question well. 3. An answer that will not change what we do, which is the doctor's test from protocol. If it is number three, do not play the move at all. The four declarations protocol requires (how many, what model, may they spawn, when they stop) are the blunder check. Say them out loud before the piece leaves your hand. ## 7. Tempo **Round trips are the real cost, not tokens.** A dispatch is a move. A move that does not improve the position loses tempo even when it succeeds. Three sequential dispatches that could have run as one parallel fan-out lost two moves, and the tokens were identical. Corollary: **prefer a pipeline to a barrier.** Make stage two wait on all of stage one only when stage two genuinely needs the whole set. "I need to flatten the results first" is not a reason to make everyone wait. --- ## 8. The openings repertoire Named formations for the shapes we actually keep playing. Each carries where it backfires, because a repertoire without that is a list of ways to look busy. ### The Scout Sweep **Play when** the map is unknown and the territory divides cleanly. **Pieces** three to eight cheap ones, in parallel, no nesting, each on its own ground. **Stops at** a ranked shortlist, with anything uncovered marked uncovered. **Backfires when** the territory is not actually disjoint, so you pay N times for one answer, or when a single file read would have settled it. Opening play only. Do not sweep in the middlegame; by then you should know the board. ### The Council **Play when** a decision needs genuine disagreement between real perspectives. **Pieces** two or three, each with a distinct lens, told to rank weaknesses before strengths and to refute rather than agree. Adversarial pass back to each is mandatory. **Stops at** a synthesis that labels every voice, including yours. **Backfires when** there is one obvious answer. Then you bought five opinions on a settled question, which is the social form of the protocol violation. This is `team-meeting`, absorbed here as one opening rather than a separate discipline. ### The Judge Panel **Play when** the solution space is wide and iterating a single attempt would anchor you to the first idea. **Pieces** N independent attempts from deliberately different angles, then parallel judges scoring them. **Stops at** the winner, synthesized, with the best ideas from the runners-up grafted in. **Backfires when** the problem is narrow. Three attempts at a problem with one right answer is three times the cost and a vote you did not need. ### Find and Refute **Play when** the output is findings: bugs, risks, audit results, review comments. **Pieces** finders fanned out by dimension, then **independent skeptics per finding, prompted to refute, defaulting to refuted when uncertain.** Majority kills it. **Stops at** confirmed findings only, with the kill count reported. **Backfires when** the finders and judges share a family and a prompt style. Measured on our own reps at **six to twelve points of same-family inflation**, which silently promoted marginal passes. When calibration is the stake, **cross-family judge.** This is the highest-value formation we own, because it is the only structural antidote to plausible-but-wrong. ### The Pipeline **Play when** work is multi-stage and items are independent. **Pieces** each item flows through every stage on its own, no barrier between stages. **Stops at** the last stage, per item. **Backfires when** a stage truly needs cross-item context, like dedupe across the whole result set or an early exit on a zero count. That is the only case that earns a barrier. ### The Lone Piece **Play when** the problem is deep rather than wide. **Pieces** one strong agent, or the orchestrator itself, and no fan-out at all. **Stops at** the answer. **Backfires when** the problem really was wide and one context could not hold it. **This is the most under-played formation in the book.** Fan-out is the lazy move: it feels like effort, it produces volume, and on a deep problem it produces five shallow passes where one deep pass was needed. When in doubt on a hard, narrow problem, play one piece well. ### The Endgame **Play** always. It is not optional and it is not cleanup. **Pieces** `shadow-mode` for the ghost, a seen/unseen ledger written to disk, the state file updated, the close ritual run. **Stops at** a written record that survives the context window. **Backfires** never. It is skipped, which is a different failure and the most common one we have. --- ## 9. Grounding: the orders travel with the piece **A piece cannot read the constitution.** A dispatched subagent does not load `cyto-protocol`. It does not load `shadow-mode`. The superpowers preamble explicitly tells it to skip skill discovery. So the discipline evaporates at exactly the moment work fans out, which is the moment it matters most. The fix is not to make every piece a lawyer. It is the same answer the sole organ doctrine gives: **the one voice carries the obligation, and binds the pieces through the orders it issues.** Every dispatch prompt carries the standing orders inline. They live in one file: `~/.claude/skills/magnus/standing-orders.md` Read it once per session and paste the block into dispatches. It is deliberately short enough to travel. `require-agent-model.sh` already enforces one slice of this at the parent, refusing any generic dispatch that does not name a model. Extending the hook to require the orders block is a follow-on, gated on verifying whether a PreToolUse hook can modify tool input. **Unverified. Do not build on that assumption.** --- ## Red flags, stop and re-read this file | Thought | Reality | |---|---| | "Let me fan out to be thorough" | Fan-out is the lazy move on a deep problem. Consider the Lone Piece. | | "I'll use the strong model to be safe" | The queen on move three. Ask what resource decides the position. | | "Haiku isn't good enough for this" | Haiku bought 113,000 messages of coverage for pennies. Ask what it is for, not what it costs. | | "The agent will figure out the context" | It cannot see the conversation. It will answer confidently and wrong. | | "It might be hard, so Opus" | Not a reason. Name the feature of the position or step down. | | "I'll verify at the end if there's time" | The endgame is where the point is scored, not where the spare time goes. | | "Everyone agreed, so it's right" | Then the prompts were too soft, or the judges share a family. | | "This is just a quick multi-agent thing" | Then declare the four and play a named formation, or do it yourself. | | "The findings came back clean" | From whom, in what relationship, and did anyone try to refute them? | ## When nothing here covers it The repertoire is the openings we have already played. The next position will not be in the book. **The duty does not lapse when the book runs out.** A strong player out of preparation does not stop playing. They think from the position in front of them, using the principles the book was derived from: develop before attacking, match the piece to what the position needs, do not lose tempo, prevent the failure before executing the plan, and convert in the endgame. An agent that plays every listed formation correctly and still burns a session producing something nobody needed has lost the game while following the book. ## The one-line test > **Is this the move, or just a move?** A move that does not improve the position loses tempo even when it succeeds.