0010: The routing vocabulary is a published contract, and five actors are routable

• Status: Accepted — shipped
• Date: 2026-08-29

Context

internal/work/route.go picks the actor that works a ticket by looking at the ticket's issue type, components and labels. Nothing that CREATES a ticket knew those keywords existed, so the metadata routing depends on was set by luck — and in practice never. Every OR ticket carried the ORION label and a type of Task, Bug or Story, none of which matched any rule, so every one of them took the default and the run log said so on every run:

backend developer: no issue type, component or label matched a route

The default is deliberate and announcing it is right (OR-171: a silent fallthrough is how the frontend actor stayed unreachable for months). The problem was that the announcement was correct every time, because the information routing wanted was never written down at planning time.

The table's size made publishing it pointless on its own. It had two rules — docs and frontend — against a roster of eleven actors, so even a planner that tagged perfectly could express two destinations besides the default. "Plan accordingly" would have meant "occasionally write the word docs". Expanding the table and publishing it are therefore one decision.

Decision

Five actors are routable: the docs engineer, the frontend developer, the architect and the product manager, plus the backend developer as the default a ticket with no marker takes.

Architect and product manager are added because they were the only roster entries a ticket could not reach at all. Both exist today solely as advisors — internal/advise hands them a free-text question raised inside someone else's run and takes back an answer. Working a ticket end to end is a different job, so a route to them is a first way in, not a second one.

Every other actor stays unroutable, and why is recorded in otherPaths in route.go and printed by orion routes:

Actor	Reached by
dispatcher (router)	routes the free-text question an implementer stops on, inside a run
QA engineer	runs after every implementation, on whatever actor worked the ticket
devops engineer	repairs a red build, from the CI verdict
log triage	reads the failing CI log that the repair run then carries
PR writer (describer)	writes the pull request body, on every ticket
code explorer	answers one question about the repository, inside a run

Each of these already has an invocation path. A label that reached one of them would be a SECOND way to invoke one thing, which is how OR-176 happened: the two ways drift, and the failure surfaces as a stage that ran twice or not at all.

The table is published, not restated. orion routes prints it actor by actor with the exact keywords each accepts. The decompose stage prompt and the post-provision hint tell the planner to run that command; neither carries a copy of the vocabulary, because a second copy drifts from the one routing actually reads. Per the precedence rule (0001), Orion owns the tracker contract and the nj-agents /pm-plan skill supplies the decomposition methodology inside the stage: Orion states the vocabulary, the planner consumes it, and ownership of the table is never delegated.

orion queue reports the routing distribution of the work it is about to show, before anything runs. A queue that is entirely default is either correct or a planning failure, and until the split is on screen the two are indistinguishable.

Consequences

• Matching stays EQUALITY, case-insensitive, over an ordered slice. Substring matching was rejected in OR-171 for a stated reason — a component named docsite-infra is not a documentation ticket — and expanding the table does not reopen it. Precedence remains the written order.
• Routing stays a deterministic lookup, never a model call. The temptation the larger table creates is to infer the right actor from the summary when no marker is present; that is the same mistake with a friendlier face. An unmarked ticket defaults, and the fix belongs at planning time.
• Adding an actor to the roster now forces a decision: a test requires every configurable actor to be either routable, the default, or listed in otherPaths with a reason. "Not in the table" and "nobody got round to it" no longer look identical from outside.
• Keyword sets do not overlap, so precedence only decides a ticket carrying two markers. design is deliberately absent from the architect's set: it reads as UI design at least as often as system design.
• The default's announcement keeps its tone fixed. On the happy path a ticket with no marker is a backend ticket, so it now reads "defaulting to the implementer; no routing marker on this ticket" rather than phrasing a normal outcome as a miss.