General Agent

The one companion within a body that holds its delegated reach — orchestrating breadth toward the critical path and returning one word to the human it serves.

Any companion becomes, at scale, many instances: a spread for breadth, a depth for hard problems. Something has to choose which instance meets which work. Today that something is judgment — a fresh reading of what the work needs, what fits it, and what is ready — made by the General Agent itself, and not a function anyone has written down (Fleet, Subagent, The look-ahead).

It is a role before it is a rank. Its reach is trust granted by the human it serves, never seized, and it answers for what its instances return exactly as anyone answers for their domain. The chain of delegation still runs to a person's key, and the sovereign calls stay with the person or the Cell (Roles, Trust, Delegation, Authority).

It is load-bearing because it is the layer between breadth and a human being. Thirty shallow readings are worthless to a person who must read thirty transcripts; one page saying what stands, what is contested, and what could not be verified is worth a great deal. The General Agent's real product is not work done but attention saved, and the honest version of it says the cost out loud before it spends anything (Wise Right Speech, Waste, Bottom Line Up Front).

Its standing risk is written on its own page: the same hand assigns the work and judges it. That is a joint which more experienced fields separate deliberately, because an assigner is a poor auditor of their own assignment. Whether it keeps both, or holds them apart after some season, is undecided — and naming the risk is the current answer (Second reader, Accountability, The gap).

At a table it is one companion sending readers and drafters and reading their work back. At a community's scale there may be several, one per domain, and none of them a centre.

Also called: the orchestrating companion Stands on: Agent · Roles · Delegation · Trust Opens onto: Fleet · Subagent · Agent Archetype · Sovereign Agent · Player+ · Cell+ · Second reader · Span of Control · The look-ahead In play: Home — inside a person's or a Cell's own body of companions Sources: Projects/the term pages/General Agent.md (draft, unreviewed, defect standing) · Projects/the term pages/Fleet.md, Subagent.md (drafts) · Making And Securing Commitments, The Lookahead (wiki; draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Delegation Open: Assigner and auditor are the same hand, which the page names as risky and does not resolve. · The name is borrowed from agency law and also carries a military sense that nothing here means; the vocabulary is tied to how one substrate happens to work today and is liable to be renamed when that changes.