herdr-dispatch

Herdr Dispatch — visible workers

Every dispatched worker runs in a pane the operator can see. Nothing runs hidden. This applies to nested subagents too: a worker that dispatches further work uses this same skill, so the whole tree stays on screen.

An in-harness subagent (the Agent/Task tool) is invisible to the operator. Use one only for read-only scouting. Anything that writes code, commits, or opens a PR goes into a pane.

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Rule 0 — every harness invocation runs in a pane

Never invoke claude, pi, codex, hermes, or grok through your Bash tool. Run them in a herdr pane so the full argv — especially --model — appears on screen.

A probe the operator could not see is not evidence. This applies to workers as much as to orchestrators, and it is the single most common thing a dispatched worker gets wrong.

Create one probe pane and reuse it:

PROBE_PANE=$(herdr pane split --current --direction down --ratio 0.4 --cwd "$PWD" \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['result']['pane']['pane_id'])")

herdr pane run "$PROBE_PANE" pi --model openai-codex/gpt-5.6-luna:low --print --no-session "probe text"
herdr pane read "$PROBE_PANE"

Record the pane id alongside any result you rely on, so the run stays auditable.

Ordinary shell work — git, npm, node, curl, file inspection — stays on the Bash tool. The rule is about harness invocations, where the model identity is the thing at stake.

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0. Verify the environment

herdr status

Proceed only if server.status: running. Every command below speaks to that server over its socket and prints JSON on stdout.

Useful one-liner to pull a field out of the JSON:

herdr pane split --current --direction right --ratio 0.5 --cwd "$PWD" \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['result']['pane']['pane_id'])"

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1. Lay out the panes

Find where you are:

herdr pane current

Split. --cwd is mandatory — it is what stops state leaking between workers.