Rule
Work tracking and activity coordination are MCP records, written by every delivery surface, regardless of Build Studio. The DPF MCP substrate is the executor-agnostic source of truth:
- Work tracking:
BacklogItem/Epic(intake),FeatureBuild(lifecycle + evidence fields),WorkCapsule(claim/heartbeat/evidence for a unit of work). - Activity coordination:
claim_capsule_scope/heartbeat_capsule/release_capsule_scope;claim_nonprod_environment_lease(the shared sandbox); the runtime-coordination map /RuntimeTarget. - Evidence:
saveBuildEvidence,reviewDesignDoc/reviewBuildPlan,save_phase_handoff,record_external_development_evidence,record_runtime_verification,record_local_integration_result.
The rule: if it isn’t in the MCP plane, it didn’t happen.
Why
Three surfaces can only be peers if there is one place that knows what each is doing. The chaos observed on the live install (2026-06-05) — 119 worktrees nobody reaps, generations of orphaned sidecars, ad-hoc CI images — traces to a registration gap, not a path difference: work happened without ever being claimed or recorded, so coordination had nothing to coordinate against. A surface that does work invisibly cannot be de-conflicted, reaped, resumed, or audited. The MCP plane is also what makes a gate provenance-agnostic (governance-approves-evidence-not-provenance): the gate reads MCP evidence, not the surface’s private state.
The sidecars that sessions spawn must be the DPF MCP (/api/mcp/v1 via DPF_MCP_BEARER_TOKEN), not generic npx servers (xcodebuildmcp, youtube-transcript-mcp). A session wired to generic MCP servers instead of DPF’s does not coordinate through the substrate at all.
How To Apply
- Claim a
WorkCapsule(or equivalent) before starting a unit of work; heartbeat it while active; release it when done. - Record gate evidence through the MCP evidence tools — never let a “green” live only in a surface’s local state.
- Wire the DPF MCP first; do not auto-spawn generic MCP servers per session (see AGENTS.md §16 “generic skills are not development precedent”).
- When the connector is offline, use the explicit DB fallback path and say so — never substitute seed/stale docs for live coordination state.
Decision Dimensions
governance_compliance: 0.9— coordination and audit both depend on every surface registering its work.evidence_density: 0.8— gates advance on recorded evidence, not unrecorded local belief.long_term_maintainability: 0.6— one substrate to query instead of three private states.blast_radius: -0.5— unregistered work is the root of sprawl, orphans, and silent collisions.
Related
one-common-process-three-surfaces— the lifecycle this plane coordinates.governance-approves-evidence-not-provenance— gates read MCP evidence, not provenance.backlog-lives-in-postgresql— the canonical intake substrate.db-fallback-explicit— what to do when the connector is offline.- AGENTS.md §17 — operational summary.
- Unified Delivery Surfaces spec §3.2 — design context.
Origin
Unified Delivery Surfaces spec, 2026-06-05 (WWMD-ratified).