The Expediter

Last lesson you stood at the pass and conducted: carve this, fire three, merge, inspect. It worked — and it needed you, order by order, remembering the sequence. In a restaurant, that conducting role has a name: the expediter. They stand at the pass with the tickets and call the kitchen — "fire two salmon, salad to the window, where's my inspection on table six?" The cooks are skilled; the expediter makes them a sequence.

Here's today's demystification, and by now you'll see it coming: an expediter is a skill file that commands a crew. You've written skills since Dinner Service Lesson 9 — routines your agent runs from one order. The only new idea is that a skill's steps can include "send this to a subagent" and "fire these three in parallel." The choreography you performed last lesson, written down once, run forever.

What you'll plate today

Your first expediter: the survey-and-recommend choreography from Lesson 5 as a standing call sheet — one order in, carve-fire-merge-inspect out, with checkpoint stops where you taste.

Ingredients

• Your kitchen-brigade project — patterns on the chart, Inspector on staff
• The Lesson 5 job fresh in memory (you're about to automate exactly it)
• About 30 minutes

Cook

1. Write the call sheet

Create a skill called "survey": the expediter's call sheet for
what we did by hand last lesson. Given a folder of items and a
question to answer about them:

1. CARVE: apply the independence test; report the carving and
   the merge plan. ⏸ CHECKPOINT: show me, wait for my go.
2. FIRE: parallel subagents, one per item, same order each,
   handbook format. Narrate the pass.
3. MERGE: one cook builds the comparison and recommendation,
   citing every item by name.
4. INSPECT: send the result to The Inspector.
5. SERVE: give me the plate with the Inspector's verdict attached
   — and the honest bill: how many cooks this run used.

Show me the skill file before installing. It's my call sheet;
I want to read every line.

Read it like you read your first job description in Lesson 4 — this file is the lesson. Notice the two design choices: the ⏸ checkpoint after carving (the one step where human judgment is cheapest and most valuable — a wrong carve poisons everything downstream), and the honest bill at the end (Lesson 9 is coming; every expediter should count its own cooks).

2. Run it on something real

Survey: the files in [a real folder — competitor pages you saved,
three drafts of something, this month's meeting recaps] — question:
[what you actually want to know].

Then watch what you've made. One order. The carving arrives; you approve or adjust ("split by topic, not by file"); the pass narrates; the plate lands inspected and billed. That's a multi-agent pipeline — the thing conference talks are made of — running from a sentence, written in plain words, in a file you can read.

3. Calibrate the choreography

Expediters improve like specialists do — by editing the file:

Calibrations from that run: [e.g. "the merge buried the actual
answer — recommendation goes FIRST, comparison below" / "add a
step: if any parallel cook fails or returns thin, re-fire it once
before merging"]. Update the call sheet, and re-run just the
merge-onward phase so I can taste the fix.

That re-fire-on-thin rule is worth stealing verbatim, by the way — crews are reliable because the choreography expects a dropped plate now and then, not because plates never drop.

4. Chart it, and set the expediter's bar

Add "survey" to STATIONS.md under CALL SHEETS, with its trigger
("when I have N similar things and one question"). Then the bar,
in CLAUDE.md: choreography becomes a call sheet when I've conducted
it BY HAND at least once and expect to conduct it again. Never
automate a sequence I haven't personally tasted step by step.

Save point: "the expediter".

That bar — by hand once, then automate — is this course's deepest habit, and you've been living it without naming it: Lesson 5 conducted manually, Lesson 6 wrote the sheet. Choreography you've never hand-run is choreography you can't debug when it drops a plate at midnight. (Midnight matters. Lesson 8 is called The Night Shift.)

When it burns

• The skill ran but skipped the checkpoint — checkpoints must be phrased as stops, not intentions: "step 1 ENDS with showing me the carving; step 2 does not begin until I say go." Cold cooks are literal — that's their virtue; write like it.
• It works but you don't trust it end-to-end yet — correct instinct, honest fix: add more checkpoints, then remove them as trust accrues. Training wheels are removable by design: "add a ⏸ after the merge too, for now."
• You want one expediter for everything — the universal call sheet is a beginner's trap; it needs so many branches it becomes unreadable, and unreadable means undebuggable. Expediters are per-choreography: survey, weekly-review, publish. Three small sheets beat one epic.
• A parallel cook wrote into the merge cook's file — a carving failure wearing a runtime costume: two stations touching one file means the independence test got skipped or its answer ignored. Re-carve; the test is law, even inside a call sheet.
• "Could the checkpoint itself be a subagent?" — you're one lesson early, and the answer is beautiful: yes, checking is a station. That's Lesson 7, and the human checkpoint doesn't disappear — it moves to where it's irreplaceable.

Order up

□ A call sheet you read line by line before installing
□ One order ran carve → fire → merge → inspect → serve, billed
□ At least one calibration — the choreography is yours now
□ The by-hand-first bar is in CLAUDE.md
□ Save point "the expediter"

Next up — Lesson 07: Quality Control. The Inspector reviews what you send it. Next, checking becomes a built-in station: verification cooks who taste every plate against the order before it ever reaches the pass — including the adversarial trick that catches what agreeable cooks miss.

Stuck on a step? Question box below.