I keep coming back to wanting Microsoft Project for MMA and along the way I keep wishing there was a great XML schema for collaborative project management.

This is kind of jumping to a solution but I think that XML is extremely categorical (while Markdown is not) and I think this strict sense of categories defines what something is and also what it isn't since it has an explicit opening and closing.

Moreover, XML is hierarchical and infinitely nestable, and I think this lends itself really well to defining and scoping projects. We can talk about the big picture or we can go into the details; in XML this is just double-clicking on a node.

Maybe the spec would look like this:

<task>
  <goal>
    Set up filesystem feature on use.sh
  </goal>
  <subtasks order="sequential">
    <task>
      <goal>
      Decide if it's going to use NFS or sshfs.
      </goal>
      <key-result>
        We have a working design doc that explains how the virtual filesystem will work.
        <deliverable ref="Filesystem Google Doc" />
      </key-result>
    </task>
    <task>
      ...
    </task>
  </subtasks>
</task>

Projects versus Tasks

I think it's more elegant to make everything tasks. Otherwise we end up in the existential land wondering "what's a project" versus "what's a task" instead of creating shareholder value.

Benefits

• Legibility and Turn Logging: A lot of this comes down to domain representation, and there's a natural fit between this xml spec and chat.xml since we could log the actual chain of thought thinking and agent turns.
• System 1 vs. System 2 Thinking: "Will this plan work?" versus actually evaluating the plan.
• Assessing Plans before they get run: Plans as object. When plans become object we can look at them critically, improve them, and just try things.
• Including Metrics in XML: What gets measured gets managed, this would let us track metrics as well.
• Auditability: We could incorporate this with chat.xml so that we save the actual prompt, execution IDs, tool calls, chain of thought, etc.

If you're also thinking about this, or working on this, reach out. omar@omarish.com.