"Check the board yourself, claim work yourself" — poll when idle, work when there's work.

Now this Agents team has a standardized office mode, but the "habits" aren't great — everyone is obedient, but they're all "slacking workers": once they finish, they just slack off; as long as nobody asks them, they have nothing to do and goof off. This won't do!

Problem

Agent teammates can communicate and shake hands to shut down. But each teammate waits for the Lead to assign tasks — if there are 10 unclaimed tasks on the task board, the Lead has to manually assign 10 times, which doesn't scale. What we want is for teammate Agents to have a sense of "ownership": check the task board themselves, claim tasks that nobody is doing, and when done, find the next one.

Solution

Autonomous Agents — Check the Board Yourself, Claim Work Yourself

Building on the previous chapter, this time we've added something called idle_poll things, and also added task claiming and auto-claiming and other content, specifically as follows:

  • idle_poll: when the teammate Agent is idle, poll the inbox once every five seconds;

  • scan_unclained_tasks: scan the work board above for tasks that can be claimed;

  • Auto-claim: if there is a claimable task and it is idle, then claim it, saying this job is mine.

In this way, a teammate Agent no longer only does the two things of doing work and sending things; instead, it does three things:

Behavior

Behavior

Exit condition

WORK

inbox → LLM → tool loop

stop_reason != tool_use

IDLE

Poll inbox + task board every 5s

60s timeout

SHUTDOWN

Send summary, exit

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How It Works

Idle Polling

It is the one just mentioned that polls once every 5s idle_poll. Previously, teammate Agents would run off as soon as they finished their work. Now that is not the case: they check every 5s whether there is new work. However, here Inbox has priority (it may contain protocol messages such as shutdown_request), and the task board comes second. That is to say, if a shutdown_request is received during the IDLE phase, it will reply directly and exit, without waiting to look for new work.

Scanning the Task Board

How do you find the task board? How do you determine which tasks can be taken over?

The AI has three conditions; as long as all three are met, the task can be claimed:

  • The task status must be pending;

  • The task owner field is empty;

  • All of the task's blockedbydependencies have already been completed.

At this point, I believe we all already have a mental model: what if these Agents claim the same task at the same time? Does this need to be locked?

Correct! In actual use, CC needs to be locked to prevent multiple teammates from claiming the same task at the same time.