Properties Instead Of A Brief
A task with a perfect set of fields and an empty body is not a task. It is a reminder that something exists.
Agent-created tasks accumulate flawless metadata — owner, due date, priority, tags — and an empty body. Three weeks later nobody can reconstruct what was meant. The test that fixes it: would the person who has to do this understand it with no memory of the conversation that created it?
Pattern
An agent creates tasks in a tracker. The fields are perfect: owner, due date, priority, area, tags, links. The body is empty, or holds a fragment like follow up re pricing.
Everything a machine needs is present. Everything a human needs is not.
Why it looks right
The metadata is the part that is hard to get right and easy to verify, so filling it well feels like the job being done. A populated task also looks complete in a list view, which is where anyone reviewing the system will see it.
And at the moment of creation the context is obvious — the conversation just happened.
Why it fails
Context evaporates on a schedule of about 3 weeks. After that, follow up re pricing is a message from a stranger. The owner either guesses, asks, or quietly leaves it — and the third outcome is the common one, because a task nobody understands is easier to postpone than to interrogate.
The metadata cannot help. Tags describe where a task belongs, not what it is.
Instead
Require a body with a fixed shape, and treat an empty one as a defect rather than a style choice:
What this is about — 2 to 4 full sentences, abbreviations spelled out
What needs doing — actionable checklist
Sources — links to the evidence
The test is a single question, applied before saving: would this be understood by someone with no memory of the conversation that created it?
Two supports make it stick. The agent writes the body first, then the fields, so the reasoning is not squeezed in as an afterthought. And an empty body fails a check rather than producing a slightly worse task — otherwise it will be skipped exactly on the busy days when the task matters most.
$ head -12 properties-instead-of-a-brief.md
$ cite properties-instead-of-a-brief
Citation id SV-5565 is stable. It resolves at
https://stillvalid.dev/c/SV-5565 even if this artifact moves to another section,
which a bare URL does not survive. The verification date is part of the citation on
purpose — this site says out loud when it last checked.
[Properties Instead Of A Brief](https://stillvalid.dev/patterns/properties-instead-of-a-brief) — stillvalid, SV-5565 (anti-pattern, verified 2026-08-14)