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idle-backlog

Generalises a 5-minute idle-trigger / work-the-queue-while-idle policy that used to live in AGENTS.md and now lives here: an agent waiting on an async result should not sleep or poll — it should pull the next applicable backlog item and advance it.

When to fire

• A long-running task is in flight (a build, a > 5 min compute script, a CI run, a background Agent/Bash), and
• you would otherwise produce no substantive output (only TICKs / status polls / “still waiting”).

What to do — priority order

Walk the queue top-down; take the first item that is applicable (see below):

1. Right-scoped Beans — run beans list to find pending beans (issues) whose scope overlaps with your current work or branch. The beans CLI natively supports hierarchies (epics, milestones, parents, dependencies).
2. QA backlog for the project’s audit axes — if no beans are found, systematically work through the QA backlog for the project’s defined audit axes. You must:
   • Run a stale refresh
   • Populate unpopulated items
   • Resolve existing issues
3. Current PR todos — the open PR’s body checklist + unresolved review-comment threads (mcp__github__pull_request_read get_review_comments).

“Applicable” = non-conflicting with the in-flight task

• Content/doc work (.md/.ts/docs) is applicable while a build runs (different files; the build is unaffected).
• A different-domain tranche can be started on a fresh branch via git worktree — never git checkout on the build’s checkout mid-build (it disrupts the running compile). The worktree shares .git but has its own working dir, so the in-flight build is untouched.
• Do not start work that edits the files the in-flight task is consuming, or that needs the in-flight result to verify (e.g. authoring new source to be built — wait for the baseline build first, per the build discipline).

Always

• Narrate in chat as tasks are taken up and completed (owner directive).
• Microcommit + push each completed item.
• When the async task finishes, return to it (report green/red), then resume the backlog.

Stop

Stop pulling backlog when the in-flight task completes (handle its result first) or the owner redirects.