cuo is the workflow engine: it drives every unit of work - a task - through one governed lifecycle, with humans holding the two acceptance gates. There is exactly one implementation workflow; improvement and hardening work runs the same machinery as net-new features.

The single workflow

ship-tasks (v2.3.x) picks the first eligible task from docs/tasks/BACKLOG.md and drives it end to end:

draft -> ready_to_implement -> implementing -> ready_to_review -> reviewing
      -> ready_to_test -> testing -> done        (off-ramps: on_hold, closed)

• Task frontmatter status is the record of truth; BACKLOG.md is the index kept in lockstep.
• One backlog for both classes: class: improvement rows carry an (improvement) tag, product rows are untagged. There is never a second backlog file.
• Failures route back to ready_to_implement with routed_back_count += 1 - there are no terminal failure states.

Human-in-the-loop is required

Two transitions are human-acceptance gates the agent must never cross by itself:

1. Review acceptance (reviewing -> ready_to_test): a human accepts the code-review packet.
2. Final acceptance (testing -> done): a human accepts the shipped task after every machine gate is green.

Between the gates the agent runs continuously and self-resolves everything it can verify. The doctrine lives in modules/cuo/EXECUTION-DISCIPLINE.md; the status contract in modules/skill/contracts/task/STATUS-REFERENCE.md.

Gates

Machine gates derive from the touched module's audit-profile.yaml: build, lint, tests, coverage on touched files, the caf audit gate, and - where a module has a sealed goldenset (modules/<m>/.awh/) - an independent awh rerun against the baseline. Green machine gates are necessary, never sufficient: the two human verdicts still decide.

Where things live

• Workflow: modules/cuo/chief-technology-officer/workflows/ship-tasks.md
• tasks: docs/tasks/<module>/task-<MOD>-NNN-slug.md; cross-cutting hardening under docs/tasks/improvement/
• In any CyberOS-initialised repo: .cyberos/cuo/ carries the same workflow, doctrine, status contract, skills, and gate runner - trigger it with the prompt in tools/install/docs/index.md or the /ship-tasks plugin skill.

Guides

• Ship your first task - the day-one, step-by-step walkthrough for employees: install, write a task, trigger the agent, hold the two gates, land the change.

Changelog

History (including the collapse of the old separate improvement track into this single workflow) lives in the changelog; this page describes only the current state.

Generated from modules/cuo/docs/index.md — edit the markdown source, not this file (TASK-DOCS-002).