Solo AI-run firm shares Claude Code seat-to-seat request.md template

The setup is deliberately unglamorous: a fixed folder, a Markdown file per request, and a filename that names the recipient. What makes it worth reading is that the author documents the failures that shaped it rather than presenting a clean design. The stalled batch of 10 requests is a case where everyone followed the rules and the work still stopped, because the handler field was blank and the receiving seat was told to wait for an assignment. The double-processing incident — two seats both concluding they were the handler, 39 seconds apart — produced the lock rule: only the seat that takes the lock proceeds.

The deadline decision runs against normal office instinct. The author's own count showed 96% of dated requests finished early, and the date mostly generated a single report to the secretary, while seats woke repeatedly to rewrite 'still waiting' — 404 times in 18 days, mostly no-change records. Deadlines now appear only when an outside party sets one, such as a customer delivery date or an application deadline; internal requests instead carry a completion condition the receiving seat can check by hand.

A closing rule sits at the top of the rulebook: the goal of a request form is to be created and then finished. Requests that could be settled on the spot or asked directly are not supposed to become forms at all — which suggests the author treats the form as a last resort, not a default.