Glossary

Delivery comment

Work arrives where the task already lives, attributed and reviewable, and the task stays open.

Definition

A delivery comment is the comment an AI worker posts on a task that carries the finished work, including any generated files, and hands it to a person for review. The pattern keeps the deliverable attached to the request that produced it, attributed to the worker that did it, and open for correction, because posting a comment does not close the task.

Term type: Polaris usage
Carries: Finished work and files
Does not: Close the task

Polaris usage, stated plainly

Delivery comment is Polaris's name for a specific mechanic rather than an industry-standard term. When an AI worker finishes a task, the runtime posts its output as a comment on that task, with generated files attached, and leaves the task open in whatever state it was in.

The alternative designs all lose something. Delivering into a separate outputs area breaks the link between the request and the result. Delivering by email leaves the workspace. Delivering by marking the task done removes the review step and makes the agent the judge of its own work.

What the pattern buys

Context stays attached
The brief, the acceptance criteria, the progress notes and the deliverable are all on one object, so a reviewer arriving a week later has everything without reconstructing anything.
Attribution is automatic
The comment has an author, and the author is the worker. Six months later it is still clear which work was produced by whom.
Correction is a reply
Asking for changes is a comment on the same thread rather than a new task, and the worker's next run has the whole conversation as context.
The close stays human
A delivered comment is a proposal, not a completion. Someone reads it, decides, and closes.

Commonly confused with

Term	What it is	The difference
Progress comment	A short note posted mid-run about what the worker is doing	Informational, posted during the job. A delivery comment carries the finished work.
Activity event	A system record: assigned, status changed, run started	Generated by the system about state, not written content with an author.
Status change	Moving the task to done or in review	A state transition. In Polaris the AI worker cannot perform the transition to done.
Attachment	A file added to a task	The payload rather than the delivery. A delivery comment usually contains attachments and the explanation of them.

The rule underneath it

Agents deliver; humans close. That single sentence is the reason the delivery comment exists in this shape, and it is why the runtime has no code path to mark a task done.

It also sets the reviewer's job clearly. Read the comment, check it against the acceptance criteria the worker ticked, look at the work log if the estimate looks wrong, then close and rate, or reply and ask for another pass.

Acceptance criteria

Written before the work, checkable after it, and binary either way.

Human-in-the-loop

The system cannot complete the loop without a person, by design.

Work log

The record that makes an unwatched run reviewable afterwards.

AI worker

The difference between an agent you prompt and an agent you assign work to.

Agents deliver, humans close

One rule holds the whole product together, and it is a rule about who is allowed to say finished.

When the deliverable is a file

A chat reply is not a deliverable if the thing you needed was a document somebody can open.

Questions people ask

+Why not just mark the task done when the agent finishes?

Because that makes the agent the judge of its own work, and removes the only reliable quality gate in the system. Delivering as a comment keeps the task open until a person has read the output and decided it is acceptable.

+What if the delivered work is wrong?

Reply on the same task with what needs to change. The worker's next run has the original brief, the criteria, its own previous output and your correction, which is normally a far better input than starting a fresh task would be.

+Can a delivery comment include files?

Yes. Generated files, including documents and PDFs, are attached to the comment, so the artefact and the explanation of it arrive together on the task that requested them.