Review a workflow

Staves can criticise a board three ways, and count what it costs. They find different things, so the useful question is which one you want.

Findings — what is structurally wrong

what is wrong with this board?

staves_issues and staves_review run structural and vocabulary checks. Typical findings:

• Jargon. A job named in system words a person in the workflow would never say.
• Coupled machinery. One job reached from two places, which usually means it is doing two jobs.
• No checks. A job that produces something and verifies nothing — nothing would tell a person it came out wrong.
• Nothing waiting. A job whose output nobody consumes.

These are cheap and worth running after every describe.

Reflection — what the shape implies

reflect on this workflow

staves_reflect reads the board as a whole rather than job by job: unreachable jobs, dead ends, nothing that returns to the outside party who asked, a must-not-happen rule that nobody guards, intent that does not match where the work actually sits.

Hats — what each role would say

review this as each role in turn

staves_hats takes every track in turn and comments on the jobs it touches, in that role’s voice and interests. The supplier cares about being told why they are waiting; the budget owner cares about being able to answer for a decision six months later. It surfaces the objections a single reviewer does not think of, and it leaves the comments on the board rather than in chat.

Volume — what the shape costs

how often does each of these run?

staves_volume records how many instances per week enter the board; per-job minutes come from staves_describe. Together they turn “this step is slow” into “this step is slow four thousand times a week”, which is usually what decides whether it is worth changing.

With a connected Langfuse project, staves_langfuse_runs and the local editor’s As run view show how the workflow actually ran in a window — runs, failures, exits, drift — measurement beside these reviews, not a substitute for them.

Questions beat opinions

Anything the review cannot determine should become a question on the board rather than a confident finding. You can answer them directly, and the answer stays attached to the job it concerns.