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The Four Pillars

Agent Baton is a project manager for Claude Code. Everything it does serves four goals, in priority order. This page is the high-level map — what Baton is for and how the parts fit together. Each pillar links to the deeper docs that implement it.

What an effort looks like

A task enters as plain language and leaves as tested, reviewed, auditable code. Between those two points it passes through the four pillars in order.

flowchart LR
    T(["Your effort,<br/>in plain language"]) --> P1
    P1["1 · Plan with foresight<br/>decompose · risk · cost forecast"] --> P2
    P2["2 · Compose the right team<br/>bespoke specialists · no context rot"] --> P3
    P3["3 · Right agent, right time<br/>dispatch each phase · QA gates"] --> P4
    P4["4 · Checks & balances<br/>independent auditor / SME verify"] --> D(["Tested, reviewed,<br/>auditable code"])

Governance is Pillar 4 — a trust mechanism that keeps the project management honest — not the headline. The pillars are the goals; a deep toolkit (CLI, REST API, memory, observability) supports them and the people who run Baton day to day.

Pillar 1 — Plan with foresight

Before a single token goes to an agent, Baton builds a complete picture of the work: what kind of task it is, which phases it needs, which agents fit them, where it is likely to break, and what it will cost. You commit to a plan, not a hope. baton plan --dry-run previews the phases, the agent assigned to each step, the gates that will block, and a cost forecast (with an explicit ±50% band) — all before execution.

→ Read the full pillar page — the vision, what ships today, and the gap.

Dive deeper: Orchestrator Usage · Engine & Runtime · State Machine

Pillar 2 — Compose the right team

A single generalist agent on a complex codebase suffers context rot — by the time it reaches step four it is carrying the weight of every earlier step plus the whole codebase. Baton's answer is bespoke team composition: the talent-builder creates narrowly-scoped specialists for this problem, so each agent gets a clean context window focused on one domain. Routing then picks the right stack-flavored variant for your project.

→ Read the full pillar page — the vision, what ships today, and the gap.

Dive deeper: Agent Roster

Pillar 3 — Right agent, right problem, right time

A deterministic engine dispatches each specialist to its assigned phase, gates the output before advancing, and recovers from crashes without losing state. The PMO flow organizes the whole effort from spec to merged PR. You drive it through the baton execute command group; the engine does the sequencing.

→ Read the full pillar page — the vision, what ships today, and the gap.

Dive deeper: Engine & Runtime · Storage, Sync, & PMO

Pillar 4 — Checks & balances

Governance serves the pillars above it: it makes sure the right agent was actually right, not just fast or syntactically correct. Risk is classified before the first agent fires; medium/high-risk work pulls in an independent auditor (with veto authority) and, for regulated domains, a subject-matter-expert. Policy hooks enforce guardrails on every tool call, and verifiable evidence bundles make the outcome auditable.

→ Read the full pillar page — the vision, what ships today, and the gap.

Dive deeper: Knowledge, Events, & Governance

The supporting layer

The pillars are the goals. Around them sits a deep toolkit that supports both the work and the people who run Baton:

How the docs map to the pillars

Pillar What it does Full page
1 · Plan with foresight Decompose, sequence, classify risk, forecast cost before execution Plan with Foresight
2 · Compose the right team Create bespoke specialists; route to the right flavor Compose the Right Team
3 · Right agent, right time Deterministic dispatch, gates, crash recovery, PMO flow Right Agent, Right Time
4 · Checks & balances Risk classification, auditor/SME verification, policy hooks, evidence Checks & Balances

For the full conceptual background, start with the Architecture Overview.