TaskTrack — A Specify Spec for Agent Task Management

It is time to put my proposition made in my previous blog post to the test. Is it possible to spec an application for execution by an agent without encoding it in source? Let's find out. One type of application every knowledge worker is familiar with is task management. Every task has a lifecycle status, dependencies on other tasks, and a history of progress. Let's give agents their own. TaskTrack is a simple but non-trivial task management system variant implemented as a Specify spec. It goes beyond checkbox-based to-do lists that agents sometimes use internally and mimics the key system features listed above. TaskTrack defines two procedures: a "Plan Authoring Run" to create an interconnected set of tasks from requirements and a "Plan Execution Run" to advance a previously authored plan toward completion. One execution run might not always be enough to achieve completion, because TaskTrack allows requesting human feedback and incorporating it during the next execution run. Furthermore, every execution run is divided into "Task Processing Run" sub-procedures to allow for advanced agent context management. TaskTrack implements all of this in less than 300 lines of text. If the implementation used source code, then, depending on the programming language, this would be enough space to implement only the required file I/O operations (TaskTrack uses files for simplicity, not a database). Natural language can easily become quite bloated, but a stringent, scientific writing style and extensive use of what the Specify standard offers can effectively counter that. The official test is, how could it be any other way, the implementation of yet another uninspired Breakout clone. The requirements, the completed TaskTrack plan, and the deliverable are contained in the repository. If you want to run the test yourself, the included README file contains the necessary information, including the launch prompts for both the authoring agent and the execution agent. Please note how both