Lifecycle Model

greatminds separates a role's responsibility from the mechanics used to run that role. The packaged schema defines the role contract; setup copies the runtime copy to .greatminds/schema.yaml. coordination/coord.yaml chooses the tool and launch mode for a concrete project.

Role Lifecycles

Lifecycle	Meaning	Normal roles
interactive	Human-paced chat. The role can ask follow-up questions and stay open for operator steering.	USER, ARCHITECT-PLANNER
self-loop	Autonomous health-check loop. The role wakes itself on a timer and may be woken early by coordd.	MAINTAINER
driven	One event creates one turn. The pane is idle between turns; coordd starts a fresh invocation when work lands.	implementers, reviewers, tester, reader, explorer, stand keeper

The product pipeline uses driven workers so idle roles do not spend tokens polling empty queues. The exception is MAINTAINER: it is a non-user-facing self-loop watchdog because fleet recovery must still happen when no product task is moving.

Lifecycle And Tool Matrix

Lifecycle	Tool	Turn mechanism	Between turns
interactive	claude, codex, cursor	User or planner-facing chat input	Session remains operator-facing
self-loop	claude	/loop plus ScheduleWakeup, with coordd early wake	Loop waits for the next health tick
self-loop	codex or cursor	Explicit loop plus shell sleep fallback, with coordd interrupt	Loop waits for the next health tick
driven	claude	coordd starts one claude -p or resume turn with rendered role bootstrap	Idle shell pane
driven	codex	coordd starts one fresh codex app-server stdio turn and persists the thread id	Idle shell pane
driven	cursor	coordd starts the configured per-turn command	Idle shell pane

For driven roles, the rule is one event, one tick, then exit. They do not run /loop, schedule their own wakeups, or short-poll queues. Their first action is still a CLI call such as greatminds inbox list or greatminds task list <queue>, which also refreshes the role heartbeat.

Wake Delivery

coordd observes queue files, inbox files, and stand state. It delivers turns or wake signals; it does not decide task transitions.

For non-driven codex and cursor roles, coordd finds the deepest sleeping descendant and sends SIGINT. That interrupts the long sleep wrapper so the next loop tick starts immediately. For non-driven claude roles, it sends the configured tmux input.

For driven roles, coordd spawns a single turn. A role that has no inbox message and no task in its owned queue exits without scheduling another turn; the next filesystem event drives it again.