Taskmaster

Taskmaster

Taskmaster is a completion guard for coding agents.

It addresses a common failure mode: the agent makes partial progress, writes a summary, and stops before the user goal is actually finished.

Philosophy

Taskmaster is built around one idea: progress is not completion.

• Evidence over narrative: The agent should not be allowed to stop based on a convincing summary alone. Completion must be explicit and machine-checkable.
• Same-session recovery: When a turn is incomplete, the right move is to continue in the same running session, not restart from scratch.
• Goal re-anchoring: Compliance prompts force the model back to the user’s actual request, not its own local notion of “good enough”.
• Automation-safe signaling: A deterministic done token makes completion parseable for wrappers and CI-style flows.

Core Contract

A run is complete only when the assistant emits:

TASKMASTER_DONE::

If that token is missing at stop time, Taskmaster blocks stop and pushes the current turn to continue. Codex monitoring stays active for later turns in the same long-lived session.

Enforcement Prompt

Taskmaster uses one shared compliance prompt for both Codex and Claude.

• Codex: the wrapper/injector path injects this shared prompt back into the same running session when stop conditions are not met.
• Claude: the Stop hook returns this same shared prompt as the block reason.

The shared prompt source lives in `taskmaster-compliance-prompt.sh`.

How It Works

• Codex path:
  • Runs through a wrapper (codex shim / codex-taskmaster launcher).
  • Enables Codex session logs.
  • Watches task_complete / turn_complete events.
  • If done token is missing, injects a continuation prompt into the same running Codex process via expect PTY.
  • A done token suppresses injection for that completed turn only; it does not permanently disable Taskmaster for future turns in the same session.
• Claude path:
  • Re