dispatching-work

Overview

See docs/roles.md for the smallest sufficient loop boundary. This skill implements dispatch mechanics once a separate workroom is selected; a launched Herdr agent and the user choose its specification, design, implementation, and the verification method inside the reality anchor the brief names.

The unit this skill manages is the agent, not the app. An app (.claude/straw-boss/apps.json, resolved upstream by work-on) is only where an agent is rooted — this skill starts the agent there, tracks it, and closes it out; it never itself decides which app a request belongs to. Every dispatched task is one agent, tracked as one instruction file under ~/.straw-boss/dispatch/ — the user's home directory, not the target project checkout (see init). This skill covers: dispatch a single agent (Tasks 1-5), dispatch a plan (Branch below, when work-on produced a multi-task dependency graph — one agent per task), list, and wrap up. Exact CLI/JSON syntax lives in references/ — dispatch-mechanics.md (single-agent dispatch + permission-mode detection), plan-mechanics.md (plan/status schemas, worktree repair heredoc, and the provider-neutral status watcher), cross-session-coordination.md (making the main agent addressable — herdr pane id primary, with provider-specific fast channels — plus mid-task interrupt syntax), shared-resource-coordination.md (a worktree isolates files, not a fixed port or a shared DB another main agent's task might collide on — one command per case: claim-port for a flexible port, wait for a fixed port or DB migration) — read the relevant one for the exact command before running it. Every requirement below is real, not a pointer to go read something else first. For a specific agent's actual live content or progress — not just its status — invoke peeking-work instead of reading a pane/transcript inline here.

~/.straw-boss/capability.json records an explicit claude-p-only opt-out from init, if the user ever gave one. Its absence is not a hard stop and is not evidence herdr is unavailable — see Task 1's no-capability.json handling; claude-p dispatch never needed it.

Self-compact. The main agent can compact its own context anytime, on its own judgment, regardless of dispatch mode or whether a plan is involved — herdr agent prompt "$HERDR_PANE_ID" "/compact [focus]" types the command into its own pane; no separate tool or permission needed. It never needs to ask the user first. Reach for it once anything the next turn would need is already persisted somewhere durable (plan.json, an instruction file) rather than sitting only in this turn's own reasoning — full mechanics, including why this never interrupts work in flight, in cross-session-coordination.md's "Self-compact".