Work-Item Brief

Produce a durable, agent-ready brief that an autonomous agent can grab and finish without a human in the loop. The brief is the context artifact. The work-item (Beads ID, status, owner, deadline) is the contract — it lives elsewhere and updates on a different cadence.

Announce at start: "Using work-item-brief to package this for an agent."

The Forbidden List

Durable briefs MUST NOT contain:

• File paths (src/billing/cancel.ts) — files get renamed, moved, deleted
• Line numbers (line 142) — code shifts on every commit
• Ephemeral references ("the file we just edited", "the function above", "as discussed")
• Snapshots of code blocks copied from the current tree
• Dates relative to "now" ("yesterday's change", "the recent refactor")

These all go stale fast and turn the brief into a lie. Use concept-level references instead: type names, interface names, function signatures, behavior. The agent finds the files by grepping for the names. See references/brief-format.md for the canonical template.

Required Sections