After this guide, your chief of staff can draft a charter for a new curator from the template, generate its runtime definition with a restricted tool list, propose the credential scope, and run a read-only smoke test before adding it to any routine.

Anatomy of a Curator

Each curator has five parts. The charter is the source of truth; everything else is derived from it.

PartWhat it is
IdentityA name and a two-letter handle. You will end up saying “ask the calendar curator,” and that legibility matters. A one-paragraph personality helps too — it shapes how the agent writes its reports.
CharterA canonical file at Atlas/team/<slug>.md: identity, mandate, scope (in and out), tools with their access mode and who granted it, numbered SOPs, escalation triggers, confidentiality tier, reporting cadence and output-size discipline.
RuntimeA sub-agent definition at .claude/agents/<slug>.md, generated from the charter. Its frontmatter restricts the tool surface to what the charter declares. This is what actually gets dispatched.
SOPsNumbered standard operating procedures — “SOP-1: daily digest,” “SOP-3: escalation alert,” “SOP-7: create event (narrow write)” — that other routines reference by number. Living documents, refined by feedback.
Tool surfaceThe minimum credentials and commands for its one job, nothing else. Held outside the vault.

The Hiring Protocol

  1. You pick who to hire next, or ask the chief of staff to recommend. Its recommendation should come with the felt limitation that motivates the hire — “the brief has no calendar signal” — not a generic wish list.
  2. The chief of staff drafts the charter from the template for that tool class. You read and edit it in Obsidian. The parts to read carefully: the scope’s out list, the write verbs (if any), and the confidentiality tier.
  3. It generates the runtime from the charter. The tool list in the frontmatter is the enforcement point; check it matches the charter.
  4. You scope the auth. Provide the credential, OAuth flow, or API token to only this member, on the machine it runs on, in a config directory outside the vault. See Credentials and confidentiality.
  5. Smoke test with a read-only dispatch: “summarise today’s inbox in five bullets.” Review the output together. Check that the curator stayed inside its charter — the first smoke test of one curator in the reference system revealed it had written to the vault and run a commit, which became a charter clause the same day.
  6. It graduates to in-rotation. The team index records the hire; the daily-brief routine starts pulling from it.

What a Good Charter Contains

  • Mandate, in one paragraph, in the human’s words. Quote the request that created the role. It anchors scope drift later.
  • Scope, in and out. “Reads the inbox; archives and labels on instruction. Never sends, never deletes.” The out list is the one that saves you.
  • Tools table: tool, access mode, granted by whom, when. Auth is a fact with provenance like any other.
  • SOPs with numbered steps and a return shape. “SOP-1 returns at most N items, each with: sender (matched against people notes), subject, one-line why-it-matters, deep link.” The return shape is what lets the chief of staff aggregate without re-reading.
  • Surface budget. The hard cap on what it returns to a brief. Without one, one noisy source swamps the message.
  • Output-size discipline. Under a few kilobytes: inline. Over: a report file in Efforts/reports/ paired with a small handle in the inbox. Never in the daily note.
  • Escalation triggers. What it flags immediately instead of waiting for the digest — a security alert, a past-due bill, a same-day conflict.
  • Confidentiality tier, and what that tier forbids putting into a summary.
  • Time zone. Pin “now” to the human’s zone explicitly. A curator that silently uses UTC produces wrong “today”s.

Templates When Repeating

The second curator of a tool class — a second Google account, a second issue-tracker workspace — is a template instantiation: copy the first charter, change the account tag and the ventures, keep the SOPs. This is why the unit is (venture × tool): the tool half is reusable, the venture half is configuration.

Firing and Rotating

A curator can be paused (frontmatter status: paused; no new requests routed; charter retained), retired (moved to Atlas/team/_archive/; tools revoked; charter kept for audit), or replaced (new charter, old one archived, old auth revoked). Curators that produce more noise than signal get pulled from the daily rotation and a task is opened to rework their SOPs — a paused curator costs nothing; a noisy one costs the brief.

The First Hire

Usually email or calendar — whichever your daily brief misses more. Read-only. One SOP. Let it run for a week before you add the second.

See it

The demo vault has a charter written, costed, and deliberately not granted. It is fictional, and it was built by Claude Code sessions running the bootstrap prompt — not written by hand.

#curators · #charters · #hiring · #sops

Hand this to your chief of staff. Plain Markdown: /guides/hiring-a-curator.md. Tell it: "Read this guide and tell me what in our system it would change."

Also for your Claude: whole-site index · bootstrap prompt · guide feed