The opencode readiness and marker measurements were made on Linux, not
on a Mac, and the docs now say so. A worker whose pane ends after it
wrote its answer file but before the marker matched answers 3 with no
answer: the rc 3 row now says the file may still be in its folder. The
example's input folder is named input, so the prompt reads cleanly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measured on opencode 1.3.0 in a private tmux socket, with a fake
OpenAI-compatible endpoint streaming the reply a character or two at a
time: the marker was on the screen, but the stripped client stream read
D, spinner, O, spinner, N, ... because opencode redraws its spinner
between the streamed pieces, so wait-output never matched it. sendmark
then waited its whole timeout and answered 2 for a reply that had
finished, with the answer file already written (opencode's write tool
wrote it without asking).
The marker wait now runs in rounds of at most 10 s, and between rounds
the answer file is a way out too: a non-empty regular file whose
checksum held still for one round is read, with matched false. The
marker stays the fast path. The answer-file wait after a marker no
longer spins when the exit wait gets no answer, and treats an ended
wait as the worker gone.
The same run measured the readiness mark: with a fresh home and a
custom provider, the first composer bar came with the composer and a
prompt pasted with its Enter at that moment was submitted, so the docs
say so instead of "not measured". The example keeps its input in a
subfolder, apart from the case's CLAUDE.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
sendmark's comment and verbs.md 5.5 listed six external modes by name,
and test/agent-skill-mode-lists.test.ts refuses any partial list of them
(the one a ninth CLI would silently miss). Both now say what the class
is: a hook-less claude, a worker on the local model, and every external
agent mode but deepseek.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The codeman skill's preamble learns the model Codeman installs on this Mac:
- local_model asks GET /api/v1/local-model and prints one JSON line: the
installed model, the coding agent that runs it and its endpoint, or the
reason there is none (not a Mac, nothing installed, an unfinished
install, a blocked install, admin only, a server without the routes).
Exit 0 only when a worker can start now or after a runtime start.
- spawn_worker <name> local (and name:local in spawn_workers) starts a
stopped runtime the way the window's Start button does, quick-starts the
installed agent with customModel, and waits for its composer (OpenCode's
bar, the claude path for a claude agent, LOCAL_READY_MARK otherwise). A
confirmation question from quick-start fails the spawn with empty stdout;
nothing is ever confirmed on the person's behalf.
- sendmark <sid> <prompt> drives any agent worker without an end-of-turn
signal: the exactly-once input body, a split marker through wait-output,
then the answer read back from a file the worker wrote in its folder
(regular files only, 256 KB at most), with one exit code per outcome.
The preamble stamp moves to 1.50.0 so every cached copy is rewritten.
The tests run the real preamble against a stubbed server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A coordinator can leave text for a worker without typing into its pane.
- Store (src/web/agent-inbox.ts): read until ack by id, seen only for the
receiver, 16 KiB/message, 512 KiB + 200 messages per inbox, full = 409
CONFLICT (never drops the oldest), 12 h TTL from each message's createdAt.
- Routes (routes/inbox-routes.ts): POST/GET /api/sessions/:id/inbox
(?wait= parks while nothing is unseen), POST .../inbox/ack (receiver
only, 403 otherwise), GET /api/agent-inbox/summary (owner-scoped counts,
not in toState()). Caller = resolveParentSessionId().
- Inbox waiters are the wait registry's third kind: same caps, ended by
cancelAll/cancelEverything.
- Opt-in snapshot (agentInboxPersistEnabled, synced, default off):
agent-inbox.json via dataPath(), 0600 tmp+rename, off deletes it, boot
prune only after a successful restore. Dropped on delete, kept on detach.
- CLI: codeman agent post | inbox [--wait] | ack, INBOX column in ls.
- waitCapacityResponse/abortOnClientHangUp moved to route-helpers.ts
unchanged.
- Docs: api-reference, README, CLAUDE.md, architecture-invariants, skill +
plugin mirror.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
#670 stamped the preamble with the version it expected to ship in, 1.43.1.
The release is 1.44.0, so the stamp would name a version that never
existed. Any new value makes cached preambles from before #670's sendwait
change stale, which is what the stamp is for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A prompt made only of blank lines joined to nothing, and sendwait then sent
a bare Enter onto whatever sat on the worker's composer. It now refuses
with "sendwait: empty prompt" (the test fails without the check).
reference/verbs.md still said sendwait takes one line and a multi-line
prompt can sit unsent; it now says sendwait joins the lines with a space,
which loses their layout, so long multi-line content belongs in a file.
Plugin mirror regenerated.
Co-Authored-By: Christian Haberl <116439789+christianhaberl@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
sendwait posted its prompt as is. With the mux now keeping line breaks, a
multi-line prompt goes in as a paste, and right after spawn_worker returns it
can land inside Claude Code's Enter-ignore window. Neither the Enter loop
here nor the server's submit check recognises a pasted block that is still on
the composer, so `Review this:\n- item 1` sat unsent while the re-wait ran
out. sendwait now trims each line, drops blank ones and joins the rest with a
space before building the body, the same result as toSingleLine, like every
other waiting sender.
The preamble stamp moves to 1.43.1 so cached preambles pick the change up;
the plugin mirror is regenerated with scripts/sync-plugin.mjs. The new test
runs the real preamble.sh with CURL stubbed and fails without the join.
docs/api-reference.md gets the submit-check sentence the README and wiki
already carry.
Co-Authored-By: Christian Haberl <116439789+christianhaberl@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
#642 stamped the preamble with the version it expected to ship in, 1.41.2. The release is 1.42.0, so the stamp would name a version that never existed. Any new value makes cached preambles from the broken version stale, which is what the stamp is for.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude Code rewrites a skill body that it loads with arguments: every bare
$1, $2 ... becomes the matching word of the request (0-based). Nine lines of
the agent preamble used bare positional parameters, so an agent that pasted
the §0 bootstrap (every session without a pre-seeded preamble: Agent Skill
injection off, the default, or a remote or Docker session) wrote helpers
that queried session "5" with timeout=claude and looked up "5=" instead of
CODEMAN_PASSWORD= in the .env, sending every call unauthenticated.
- $1/$2 -> ${1}/${2} in preamble.sh and the identical §0 heredoc in
SKILL.md; same bash, and Claude Code's pattern (\$\d+(?!\w)) skips it.
- CODEMAN_PREAMBLE 1.33.4 -> 1.41.2, so a cache file written by the broken
bootstrap (which carries the old stamp) is rewritten on the next run.
- A comment at the top of the preamble states the rule.
- New test: Claude Code 2.1.300's substitution applied to SKILL.md with
sample arguments must leave the body, and the pasted heredoc, unchanged.
It fails on the old file with the exact sessions/5 and timeout=claude lines.
- plugins/codeman re-synced; patch changeset.
Verified with real Claude Code 2.1.300 (the delivered heredoc is now
byte-identical to preamble.sh; before, 9 lines differed) and by running the
pasted helpers against a local recording server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
spawn_worker builds its quick-start body itself ({caseName, mode,
parentSessionId}), so an agent driving the skill had no way to give a worker
the advisor without hand-building the call and losing the readiness ladder,
hooks vetting and trust-dialog fallback. Setting CODEMAN_WORKER_ADVISOR
(fable / opus / sonnet) now adds `advisorModel` for every claude worker that
spawn_worker or spawn_workers starts; other modes ignore it.
A refused value fails the spawn with the server's INVALID_INPUT message. A
server without advisor support drops the field silently (the schema is not
strict), so spawn_worker reads it back and says so on stderr.
The preamble changed, so CODEMAN_PREAMBLE is bumped to 1.33.4 and stale
cached copies are rewritten instead of silently ignoring the variable.
SKILL.md's heredoc and the plugin mirror are synced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The first shape of the Enter loop read the composer BETWEEN two short waits,
and tested `wait.ended` (the session exiting) where it meant `timedOut`. A
`stop` that fired while no wait was open was lost, since signals have no
history, and a re-wait that had already resolved on `stop` fell through into
another wait that could never see the edge again: measured twice, the answer
was on screen and sendwait ran its whole 580 s slice anyway.
The long re-wait (a tagged duplicate of the original frame) is now registered
first and kept open in the background for the rest of the call; the loop reads
the composer and re-sends Enter beside it, stops when the prompt has left or
the wait's response has landed, then returns that response. Measured: the
stranded prompt got one extra Enter and sendwait returned on `stop` at 36 s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude Code 2.1.277 takes typed text the moment its composer paints but
ignores Enter for the first 30 to 50 seconds after it (measured 2026-09-19
through the input route: an Enter at 28 s stranded the prompt, one at 51 s
submitted it). The text+Enter pair `sendInput` sends 50 ms apart therefore
left every programmatic prompt sitting unsent, and every waiter burned its
timeout on a turn that never started.
Server: `SubmitVerifier` (session-submit-verifier.ts), armed from
`writeViaMux` for every mux write that carried a carriage return, reads the
pane on a 2 s to 60 s schedule and re-sends Enter only while the last
composer line (the CLI's own prompt glyph) still holds the head of what was
sent. An empty composer, other text, or no composer line at all ends it; a
newer write replaces the schedule.
Skill: `sendwait` gets the same loop (`_composer_text`, no-break space
stripped by its bytes for BSD sed) for servers that predate this, and the
preamble version moves to 1.30.1 so seeded agents pick up the fresh copy.
SKILL.md's heredoc and the plugin mirror are regenerated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A long orchestration creates one case directory per worker and deleting the
sessions never removed them, so ~/codeman-cases accumulated scratch folders
that were indistinguishable from real projects. They are now labelled and
have a cleanup path.
- src/agent-case-marker.ts: a case dir quick-start CREATES for an agent-driven
spawn gets a .codeman-agent-case.json marker (when, by whom, parent session,
mode). Only the create branch writes it, so a linked case, a cloned repo or
any pre-existing path is never labelled; reading is total, so a malformed
marker means "not agent-created" rather than a half-trusted entry.
- The signal is the new X-Codeman-Agent-Origin header the skill preamble sets
on its shared curl (preamble bumped to 1.22.0), or an agentOrigin body
field, falling back to a resolved parentSessionId so a worker spawned by a
stale skill copy is still labelled.
- GET /api/cases publishes it as agentCreated; GET /api/cases/agent-created is
a read-only cleanup listing adding inUse and modifiedAt; Add Case -> Manage
badges each case and offers a review-then-delete sweep that names every
directory in its confirm and skips any case a live session is working in.
Removal stays on the existing DELETE /api/cases/:name.
- Agent preamble caches are collected too: ~/.cache/codeman-agent-<id>.sh was
written per claude session and never removed (236 leftovers measured on a
working machine). Now deleted with the session and swept at boot, guarded by
a live-session keep set plus a 7-day age floor.
Verified end to end on an isolated instance: marker written for header, body
and lineage-only spawns, absent with no agent signal and for a pre-existing
directory; inUse flipping on session end; badge, sticky bar, confirm and sweep
driven in a browser; preamble seeded on create, removed on delete, boot sweep
taking only the aged orphans.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every claude session in a directory claude had not seen before died about six
seconds after it started (`Pane is dead (status 1)`), before the agent drew a
composer. Reproduced on a fresh case and measured.
Claude Code 2.1.252 rewrote the dialog. It used to be
❯ 1. Yes, I trust this folder
2. No, exit
and is now unnumbered, reversed, and highlights the option that quits:
❯ No, exit
Yes, I trust this folder
Detection still worked (the confirm affordance carries the match once the
numbered option text is gone), so the failure was entirely in the answer: the
auto-accept pressed Enter on the highlighted default, which is now exit.
trustDialogNextKey() reads the ❯ marker off the rendered pane and returns ONE
keystroke at a time: an arrow while the cursor is on the wrong option, Enter
only once the screen shows it on the trust option, and null for a frame that
does not say. Both layouts are handled, and which way the trust option lies is
read from the frame rather than assumed, so a further reordering costs a
repaint instead of a session. The last marked option wins, because the
direct-PTY fallback reads an append-only buffer where an older frame must not
out-vote the freshest one.
Two things only a live pane showed:
- The scan ran solely from the PTY onData handler. The arrow that moves the
cursor is the last output the pane produces, so the first fix parked every
session with the cursor sitting on the right option and no Enter ever sent.
It now schedules its own follow-up read (_trustDialogTimer, cleared in
_clearAllTimers()), offset past the scan throttle so the chain cannot break
on a boundary.
- The keystroke cap goes 3 -> 6, since answering is no longer one press.
The bundled codeman skill had the same blind \r as its bounded fallback, so
preamble 1.21.0 replaces it with _trust_key/_accept_trust: read
terminal?full=1, steer onto the trust option, re-read, then confirm. Those
keystrokes go out under their own clientId, because input sequence numbers are
monotonic per client and spending prompt numbers on dialog keys would make the
next send-and-wait look like a stale duplicate and vanish while reporting
success. The readiness recipes in docs/extending-codeman.md,
docs/api-reference.md and the skill's own reference carry the corrected answer,
plus a symptom-table entry for a worker whose pane is dead seconds after spawn.
Verified live on an isolated instance (own data dir and tmux socket): fresh
case -> arrow at 5 s -> Enter at 7 s -> composer, with hasTrustDialogAccepted
recorded. With the server-side auto-accept disabled in a throwaway copy, the
skill's fallback cleared a genuinely parked dialog in 1.1 s and spawn_worker
took a brand-new case to a live composer in 7.2 s; spawn_workers + sendwait +
last_text then ran end to end.
The agent skill could spawn a worker in any mode, but it could only
DRIVE a claude one: every other CLI has neither a real end-of-turn
signal nor an answer to read, so the recipes route them through output
markers.
dsh has both halves now -- its harness reports idle/working/blocked to
Codeman, and the previous commit reads its transcript -- so it joins
claude as a mode the four verbs work on unchanged. `spawn_workers alpha
beta:deepseek` is a mixed fleet in one call, and `sendwait` / `last_text`
/ `delete_session` need no per-mode variant.
Preamble 1.20.0 (SKILL.md's §0 heredoc regenerated from it):
- `spawn_worker` grows a deepseek branch that gates on the harness
composer. ⚠️ Readiness there is NOT the stop signal: the harness
reports idle at BOOT ~300 ms before its composer paints (measured
2.26 s vs 2.56 s after spawn), so a send-and-wait fired straight after
quick-start resolves on the boot edge, reports a turn that never ran,
and strands the prompt in a pane not yet taking input. Waiting for the
composer also spends that edge, since signals are edge-triggered.
- `spawn_workers` takes `name[:mode]`, so a mixed fleet stays one
concurrent call. Case names still have to be unique -- the mode never
disambiguates two workers that would share a directory.
- `sendwait` asks for `wait:"stop,exit"` instead of the `wait:true`
default set. That set also carries `idle`, which for an external CLI is
inferred from output stabilization: on a dsh worker whose TUI repaints
rarely, the re-wait resolved in 0 ms with `signal:"idle"` on a turn
with three minutes left to run. It also makes a wrong mode loud -- the
modes that cannot deliver `stop` answer 400 before writing anything,
instead of resolving on a flap.
- The self-heal resend carries `delivered:true` forward. The resend is a
tagged duplicate, so the server truthfully reports `delivered:false`
about a write it skipped, and §1's cleanup then read a completed turn
as an undelivered one and kept a finished worker forever.
- dsh workers spawn with the permission posture the Run button sends,
because the harness default still asks and a worker parked on an
approval row cannot finish a fan-out. The multi-user clamp still
applies.
Docs: a worked dsh flow in recipes.md, readiness and the signal rules in
verbs.md, and the corrections this makes necessary -- `stop`/`blocked`
are no longer claude-only, and `last-response` is no longer permanently
empty for deepseek. The integration guide gains a section on reading a
session back and driving one as a worker; its web-UI section was also
stale (that server moved out of a shell session).
The static guard that keeps those lists from naming some external CLIs but
not others is extended rather than exempted: it now knows the three real
classes inside that family (no transcript, no hook signals, and the
positive twin -- the modes whose answers can be read), with the hook class
derived from `hooksAvailableForMode()` so the predicate and the prose
cannot drift apart. Any other partial list still fails, and a new backend
belongs to none of the classes until someone says so.
endpoints.md named 1.18.x as the version where workspace hooks became a
setting, but 1.18.x servers do NOT have this behavior — an agent driving
one would falsely conclude its workspace has hooks. The feature ships in
1.19.0. And preamble.sh changed content this PR without bumping its
CODEMAN_PREAMBLE stamp, so a cache stamped 1.18.3 would pass the
staleness check while holding old bytes; stamp bumped to 1.19.0 in
preamble.sh and the SKILL.md heredoc together (byte-identity pin).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The workspace-hooks install makes the skill's central hooks rule wrong in the
cautious direction. Six places told a worker that a linked case or a raw
workingDir has no `stop`/`blocked` and that send-and-wait cannot be trusted
there, so an agent would hand-roll output-marker synchronization in exactly the
workspaces where `wait:true` now works.
Rewritten against the setting rather than directory provenance:
- verbs.md §5.1: the where-to-spawn table, the rule paragraph (now naming
`workspaceHooksEnabled`, default ON, the add-only merge, and the boot sweep of
recovered sessions), and the silent-failure warning. The three cases that stay
hook-less regardless are called out: remote SSH sessions, docker cases that
opted out, and a workspace Codeman cannot write to.
- verbs.md §5.3: the send-and-wait precondition is "the workspace has the hooks
block", not "a case Codeman created".
- endpoints.md: the Signals-by-mode table is now keyed on the setting, with rows
for OFF, for remote/docker-opt-out, and for a session from an older server.
The old create-path grep list becomes a "before 1.18.x" note.
- SKILL.md §2 + the cost list, recipes.md Flow-1 contrast, messaging.md step 1.
"Check, do not assume" is kept and promoted to the load-bearing habit, because
the setting is not visible from the call and a session created by an older server
that has not restarted still has nothing.
The `spawn_worker` hooks grep STAYS: it guards the setting being off, remote
sessions, and older servers. Only its diagnostic changes, since "pick an unused
name" is no longer the fix. That text lives in both the §0 heredoc and
`preamble.sh`, which `test/agent-skill.test.ts` pins byte-identical, so both are
patched with the same bytes.
Docs only, no behavior change. 23 skill tests green, full test:ci 5109 passed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two live failures from one root cause: Claude Code loads a same-named
user-level skill (~/.claude/skills/codeman, written once by `codeman skill
install`) over the fresh per-case copy, and nothing ever refreshed it. A
stale Aug-9 copy (pre fast-path, pre lineage header) made every agent-driven
spawn run the old recipes: workers spawned serially with pid polls and
without X-Codeman-Parent-Session, so the web UI drew no lineage arcs.
- refreshUserAgentSkill(): session create now refreshes a marker-owned
user-level copy (refresh-only: absent copies are not installed,
foreign/symlink copies stay untouched).
- seedAgentSessionPreamble(): local claude session create pre-seeds the
skill's preamble into ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-~/.cache}/codeman-agent-<id>.sh,
single-sourced from the new skills/codeman/preamble.sh, so the skill's §0
bootstrap collapses to a two-line loader instead of a ~150-line paste the
model has to type out (measured ~47s of generation per run).
- SKILL.md: §0 now leads with the loader and keeps the full block as the
stale/missing fallback; explicit verbatim-paste warning (a hand-assembled
preamble is how the header and the fast-path functions got lost);
spawn_worker also sends parentSessionId in the body as defense in depth;
preamble stamp bumped to 1.18.3 so pre-fix cached preambles self-heal.
- test/agent-skill.test.ts pins preamble.sh byte-identical to the SKILL.md
heredoc and covers seeding (XDG + HOME fallback, 0600) and the user-level
refresh (absent/stale/foreign).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer