ADR-0001: Org-to-execution pipeline

Status: Superseded (2026-07-03). protoMaker was decommissioned from the fleet; the org→execution board integration described here no longer exists. Retained as historical record.

• Status: Accepted — 2026-05-27
• Deciders: Josh (operator)
• Related: ADR-0002, ADR-0003, protoMaker#3975

Context

The protoLabs fleet needs a single, legible path from a high-level idea to executed engineering work across multiple projects. The moving parts:

• Linear — where org/portfolio planning happens.
• protoWorkstacean — the switchboard; hosts Ava (helm) and Quinn (QA).
• protoMaker — the engineering-project system; owns project boards, decomposition, and per-project execution (auto-mode / proto / the per-project Roxy PM agent).
• GitHub — where issues and PRs live.

Earlier drafts had Ava decomposing an initiative into per-repo GitHub issues herself. That puts decomposition in the wrong place and makes Ava fat.

Decision

A two-tier pipeline with a strict separation of responsibilities.

Roles:

• Linear = org/portfolio planning. It holds initiatives, not granular engineering tickets. Granular engineering work never has its terminal home in Linear.
• Ava (protoWorkstacean) = portfolio manager. She receives intake, decides which project it belongs to, and forwards. She does not decompose.
• protoMaker = decomposition + execution. It turns an initiative into project → epics → milestones → features, and drives the work (Roxy as per-project PM, proto as hands).
• Quinn (protoWorkstacean) = QA gate on the resulting PRs.

Two intakes, coexisting:

1. Initiative-level (create-project). A Linear ticket assigned to the Ava agent is the trigger. Ava forwards it into protoMaker's create-project intake. protoMaker creates the project and decomposes it into epics → milestones → features. Use for new projects / substantial initiatives.
2. Issue-level (incremental). A GitHub issue on a project's repo → protoMaker's webhook ingestion → a backlog idea on that project's board. Use for incremental work on existing projects. Keystone: protoMaker#3975 (route issues to the right project by repo, not a default).

Reporting flows back up: protoMaker → protoWorkstacean via POST /publish (feature.completed / feature.failed); GitHub → release.published; Quinn audits PRs and reports verdicts. protoWorkstacean's scheduler + GitHub reads provide the check-in loop that keeps in-progress work unblocked.

Consequences

• Ava stays thin: routing and forwarding, never decomposition. Decomposition hierarchy is owned in one place (protoMaker).
• Linear stays high-level; we don't pollute the org layer with engineering features. (This is why an engineering task filed as a Linear ticket gets re-homed, not kept.)
• Net-new work this implies: a create-project intake on protoMaker (initiative-level) and #3975 (issue-level routing). Delivery mechanism is set by ADR-0002.
• The fleet is dogfooded: the build-out of this pipeline is itself tracked in the Linear "Portfolio fan-out" project.