Manager vs. coworker: two tiers, two different jobs
This family now has two primitives that both describe "a coworker-shaped thing in this repo's operational plan." They are not duplicates -- subagentroles.com catalogs the tier that executes; this site catalogs the tier immediately above it that owns the outcome and never executes.
| Primitive | Tier | Owns | Never does | Talks to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manager (this site) | manager | Outcomes -- a goal plus acceptance criteria | Execute the deliverable (code, copy, critique, audit) | UP: operator (summary only) · DOWN: exactly one coworker (dispatch) |
| Role (coworker rows) | coworker | Execution of a dispatched task | Report directly to the operator | UP: its manager · DOWN: a subagent, for deterministic pieces |
The durability gate, in both managers' own words
project-manager: "a completion is only accepted if: the coworker/subagent ran Sentry-instrumented (agent-hierarchy.md §durability), the rubric cleared (durable-agent-ci-cd-rubrics), and evaluator.pass_if holds. Green tests alone are not 'done'."
design-manager: "accept a completion only if its evaluator.pass_if holds, the coworker ran Sentry-instrumented, and the ci-cd rubric cleared. Green output alone is not 'done'."
Both managers state the identical three-part gate independently -- Sentry instrumentation, rubric pass, and evaluator pass_if -- which is why this site's schema has one durability_gate column rather than three separate fields per instance.
Escalation: iMessage, explicitly not Slack
project-manager's SKILL.md states escalation goes to cowork/data/mailbox/operator.jsonl, "the manager delivers it to the operator's phone via iMessage (cowork/plugins/imessage). Slack/Telegram are not used." design-manager's own loop step 7 says the same: "task_transition back to design-coworker, and mailbox_send an escalate message to the operator (delivered via iMessage)."
Honest scope note
This repo has exactly two manager-tier skills installed as of this pass: anthropic-skills:project-manager and anthropic-skills:design-manager. Every other domain named on subagentroles.com (engineering, data, finance, legal, HR, sales, operations) has a domain_coworker row there but no matching manager-tier skill here -- this site does not fabricate one to fill out the roster. See the homepage for the live 3-row board.