The multiplayer table

The failure of a shared harness is not the agents. Rules that travel as one person’s prompt context stop nothing a rule was never in a position to stop, and architectural choices get made silently inside a diff, where the team inherits them only when they are load-bearing. The capstone’s claim: the coordination layer is already the network. The desk carries every ask whole, the quorum, the gate and the budget are fields on the file, and every decision lands as one auditable line with the run beside it.

The direction note maps what is missing onto four SPEC gaps, collected as issue #30: grants that pin who may answer each item, a human hold that survives a restart, presence (who is at the table), and quiescence (when a run has nothing left to wait for). The team demo walks the surface that exists today; this chapter, when it ships, walks the four gaps and what each one changes.

Not built beyond what the demos show: two of the four gaps exist only as written direction, and the people on the demo pages are invented ones deciding over invented code.