Skip to content
How it worksWhy DetentPricingDocsSelf-hostVideos
Docs Operate Detent Mirrored upstream
admission.md
Docs source v0.164.2 13d15fec6a14 View this file at the pinned commit ↗

Admission criteria

Back to README

Admission criteria and the issue effort rubric are project-owned text. The lists below are examples; Detent has no built-in rubric.

The shared project workflow can define required issue sections:

## Issue Contract

- Acceptance criteria
- Must not break
- How we know it worked

These three sections are the default without configured contract text. Required sections must contain text; headings inside code fences do not count. Admission and Todo dispatch use one evaluator. A failure uses agent.stop_run.target_state (Blocked by default) with a structured human_action naming missing sections and drafting a fix from the issue and project instructions. This replaces the old completion-heading recognition.

Native creation and body edits retain human confirmation of section contents. Machine actors and machine-origin stamps require a subsequent human body save. Changing criteria invalidates their confirmation; effort and origin metadata do not. A satisfying human edit clears the contract action, and existing recorded-blocker recovery returns the issue to its recorded executable lane. The orchestrator owns lane changes.

The native upgrade exempts issues already outside Backlog. New issues and existing Backlog work are checked. The local runtime persists the rollout time and checks new work or work entering Todo afterward.

  • Alignment — Does this serve a stated current priority? Do not propose a candidate that maps to no stated priority.
  • Readiness — Is the problem actionable, with the acceptance conditions needed by the agent that will implement it?
  • Size — Is the work bounded enough for one agent to complete?

Issue effort selection

  • medium — Small, mechanical, and tightly specified.
  • high — Standard feature or fix with ambiguity or a cross-cutting surface.
  • xhigh — Tricky state, concurrency, restart, or recovery semantics.

An issue body can carry a detent-agent block that sets effort for that issue. Each stage clamps it to its configured ceiling; see session limits by complexity level. detent doctor warns when a project's AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md contain no detent-agent guidance.

The backlog_admission proposal pass reads candidates through tracker selectors that tracker.kind: hub_native does not provide, so native projects cannot enable it.