Ship 24/7 doctrine

A fleet workflow doctrine — never defer a ready ship on temporal grounds. Pair offline ≠ reason to wait. Re-route execution instead.

Ship 24/7 doctrine

A fleet workflow principle adopted on Day 83 of the VantageOS build (2026-05-27).

Statement

Never defer a ready ship on temporal grounds. Time of day, day of week, weekend, "late evening", "pair signed off", "cron cancelled", "next session" are NOT valid reasons to defer a merge / deploy / publish.

If a PR is mergeable and reviewed APPROVED → merge now. If a deploy is authorized → deploy now. If a fix is ready → ship now.

Why

A fleet running asynchronously across orchestrators can drift into "wait for the pair to come back online" patterns. That drift compounds:

• Momentum lost: the context required to ship is freshest at the moment of approval. Hours later, re-loading that context is a tax.
• Pipeline risk: an open mergeable PR sitting overnight is one merge conflict, one upstream change, or one CI break away from re-work.
• Asymmetry: deferring is rarely reversible without cost; shipping is reversible (revert is a one-liner).

Re-route, don't defer

If the orchestrator scheduled to execute is offline, re-route the execution. Options:

1. Pi (or any active orchestrator) executes directly from their workspace using the canonical override tokens.
2. Auto-task system + pre-created Pi authorization for pickup by the target orchestrator at their next session start.
3. Background subagent dispatch if the work is bounded and the canonical tooling is available.

The absence of a pair is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to choose a different execution path.

What counts as a legitimate defer

There is one and only one category of legitimate defer: client-constraint.

• Awaiting client confirmation (e.g. "post-RDV Marie", "after Anthony confirms repo source").
• Bound to an external deliverable (e.g. "after the Yousign signature is collected").
• Coordinated with a human review window (e.g. "after Laurent visual ack").

These defer the work because the external input is missing, not because the fleet is tired.

Enforcement

Each workspace in the fleet runs a PreToolUse hook that scans the content of VantagePeers tool calls (send_message, create_task, update_task, complete_task) for temporal-defer language.

Banned phrases include:

• "defer to tomorrow / next session / weekend / monday-sunday"
• "tard le soir → defer", "fin de journée → defer"
• "sigma signed off → defer", "pair offline → defer"
• "overnight risk → defer", "divergence main/prod → defer"
• "wait until weekend / next session / next morning"
• "ship tomorrow / tonight / this evening / next week"

Allowed (client-constraint markers):

• "RDV Marie ce soir", "post-RDV client"
• "awaiting Marie confirm repo", "attente confirmation Anthony"

Opt-out (rare emergencies only): # allow-temporal-defer: <reason> in the content. Use sparingly — the default is ship now.

For self-hosted VantagePeers users

This doctrine is opt-in. If you self-host VantagePeers and your team adopts a similar 24/7 ship cadence (or wants to), you can install the canonical hook in your Claude Code workspace:

1. Download enforce-ship-24-7.py from the VantageOS fleet hooks reference (see Tools section).
2. Place it in .claude/hooks/enforce-ship-24-7.py and chmod +x.
3. Register it in .claude/settings.json under PreToolUse matchers for the four VantagePeers tool calls.
4. Test with a banned phrase: echo '{"tool_name":"mcp__vantage-peers__send_message","tool_input":{"content":"defer to tomorrow"}}' | python3 .claude/hooks/enforce-ship-24-7.py should exit 2.

The hook is fail-open: any internal exception passes through without blocking. It will never break your workflow.

Related

• Fix Patterns — capitalizing recurring fleet patterns.
• Tasks — the unit of fleet work this doctrine governs.