Topics discussed:

• The export operation was realigned so that a finished job returns a 303 and the client follows the redirect to collect the result. The point is separation: status polling and result fetching stop sharing a response, so their status codes can't clash and each can grow its own headers. The deliberate decision was not to imitate bulk export — SQL on FHIR returns Parameters rather than a JSON manifest, so pretending to be bulk export buys nothing, and unlike bulk export there's no legacy to carry. Bulk export itself may move to the same pattern eventually.
• An experiment with a spec-driven workflow for agent coding in the repo: before making a change you write a change-request folder describing what you're doing and why, and that reasoning becomes part of the history rather than evaporating. Paired with a skill that pulls the relevant Zulip threads and past meeting transcripts into the design document. As someone put it — maybe waterfall isn't so bad when agents do it, because it's fast enough that it doesn't feel like waterfall.
• The query page is being refactored to document a convention for generating a Library resource from a plain SQL file via a magic comment, so that anyone building tooling follows the same shape. Table aliases and parameters go in alongside it. Framed as an optional section rather than a requirement.
• The Zulip thread on empty collections has one response so far. The suggestion was to prod the implementers directly — specifically everyone whose engine currently returns a string — since they're the ones the answer costs something.
• A walkthrough of the US federal rural health transformation programme raised a question the group kept circling: the money funds value-based care, value-based care needs analytics to identify trends and at-risk patients, but who actually writes the queries and views? The infrastructure side is what this group builds; the clinical content is somebody else's job and nobody has volunteered. One idea floated was partnering with a standards body that authors the ViewDefinitions and queries, with any conforming engine free to run them. The blunter observation was that FHIR analytics has made almost no inroads into value-based care so far — which is awkward, because you can't run a value-based programme if you can't measure what happened.