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>
The changeset ships this as 1.18.2, so the stamp, the bootstrap's grep/write
condition, both re-source guards and the recipes guard all carry 1.18.2 now
instead of a version that would never exist.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fifteen review findings on the fast-path rewrite plus one caught live, all
verified against a real 1.18.1 server before landing:
- sendwait picks a fresh seq (the epoch second) instead of a fixed 2, so a
second prompt to the same worker is typed instead of silently swallowed as
an already-applied duplicate; explicit seq remains for deliberate resends
- sendwait self-heals stranded delivery: an Ink repaint occasionally eats the
Enter (observed live), so a timed-out short first wait sends one bare \r and
re-waits by resending the identical frame as a tagged duplicate
- spawn_worker verifies the resolved casePath carries Codeman hooks (the same
/api/hook-event marker the server checks), refusing names that resolve to
linked or pre-existing hook-less directories instead of running the job in
what may be the user's real repo
- spawn_worker probes the trust dialog after a short 5s composer wait, not the
full 45s, restoring the ladder staging verbs.md documents; on a readiness
miss it deletes the half-spawned session and returns 1 with empty stdout,
so a prompt can never be typed blind into a trust dialog
- spawn_workers refuses duplicate case names and empty argument lists, and
keys result files by index
- section 1 is bash 3.2 compatible (indexed arrays, no declare -A), prints the
full delivered/timedOut/signal tuple per worker with an explicit line for a
missing result, deletes only workers whose turn really ended (a timeout
means still working), cleans up spawned siblings when any spawn fails, and
guards its mktemp
- last_text takes the previous answer as an optional second argument for
consecutive-turn reads (the transcript briefly serves the prior answer
after a stop, observed live)
- the stale duplicate bullets in section 1's closing list are gone
- reference/verbs.md joins the mode-list drift guard's file list
- README's skill inventory covers verbs.md and the new SKILL.md shape
- the changeset is minor so the shipped release matches the 1.19.0 stamp
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measured against a live 1.18.1 server, the API does the whole job in about ten
seconds: two cold claude workers spawned and ready in 6.3s, both tasked and both
answers read in 4.0s more. The slowness users reported was agent-side.
Three causes, all of them things the skill taught:
- It taught serial spawning. Nothing in the main document showed `&`/`wait`, so
"spawn two workers" read as "do the readiness ladder twice", which is one model
turn per worker.
- It had no spawn primitive. The happy path had to be reassembled on every run from
where-to-spawn, a four-stage readiness ladder, send-and-wait, the fan-out caveats
and a recipe with two variants. Each is a decision, and most carry a warning.
- It cost ~16k tokens before the first call, at 3.6:1 prose to code, with 25 warning
glyphs and 55 occurrences of "never". A document that is mostly failure modes
teaches caution, and caution bills as thinking tokens.
The preamble now defines the verbs rather than describing them: spawn_worker,
spawn_workers (concurrent), sendwait, last_text. Section 1 composes them into the
whole job in one Bash call and says to stop reading there.
Two ceremonies the measurements retired: the pid poll (one iteration, 33ms, and
wait-output already blocks on the composer) and reading settings.local.json to check
hooks for a case quick-start creates, which always has them. That check stays
required for linked cases and raw paths, where its absence silently breaks
send-and-wait.
The bootstrap's write condition now greps the version stamp, so a stale or truncated
preamble self-heals rather than failing and asking for a manual rm. The stamp line is
kept bare because the grep anchors on it with $; an inline comment there would rewrite
the file on every bootstrap.
Section 5 moved to reference/verbs.md behind an index, cutting the always-paid
SKILL.md from ~16.4k to ~7.6k tokens. Section numbers and anchor slugs are unchanged,
so existing references still resolve; all 201 anchors across the five files were
checked, with the checker positive-controlled against an injected bad link.
Verified by extracting the code blocks from the shipped file and running them against
the live server: bootstrap plus full fast path, two workers resolving on the
definitive stop signal, answers read and sessions deleted, in 6.8s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Second review pass on #282, the three items left open after f4dcfbe.
1. `codeman doctor` and the run mode disagreed about pi. The registry entry
accepted a bare `which pi` hit while pi-cli-resolver demanded semver-shaped
`--version` output, so the Dependencies panel could report an installed Pi CLI
on a box where Run Pi stays hidden, which reads as a broken mode rather than a
missing install. Both sides now share one exported PI_VERSION_REGEX, and
PathResolver gains an opt-in `requireVersionMatch` so a binary that fails the
shape check is reported MISSING instead of installed-with-unknown-version.
Only pi sets it; every other tool keeps its current behaviour.
2. The isAltScreenStripMode comment justified excluding pi with "the alt screen
is load-bearing for its fullscreen TUI". That is not what exclusion does: pi
is tmux-backed, so it falls through to isMuxAltScreenOnlyStripMode, which
strips the alt-screen toggles anyway. What exclusion actually preserves is
`\x1b[3J` and the mouse DECSETs, which is the real reason (pi renders into the
main screen and is mouse-aware). Comment and changeset now say that, and state
the consequence: fullscreen pi paints into the main buffer, like vim in a tmux
shell session.
3. skills/codeman still enumerated the five pre-pi modes in nine places, telling
agents a backend does not exist and understating class-wide caveats by one
mode. All updated, plus stale session.ts line references refreshed.
Tests: a new static guard derives the mode set from the Zod schema (not a copy)
and fails when a skill enumeration lists a partial set of external CLIs, verified
by mutation. It also documents the one legitimate exception it found: the "writes
no transcript" lists drop codex, which does write a rollout Codeman reads back.
Plus doctor cases for an unrelated `pi` on PATH and registry/resolver regex parity.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude Code v2.1.224+ gives sessions ListAgents/SendMessage and a per-session
inbox socket. Codeman's claude workers are ordinary local Claude Code sessions,
so the agent skill now teaches task delivery and result collection over
messaging where available (multi-line exactly-once messages, mid-turn steering,
latched replies), with the HTTP primitives keeping spawn, readiness,
synchronization, liveness and delete, and a bounded fallback to the HTTP
recipes whenever the feature is absent. All mechanics verified live against
claude-cli 2.1.226.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The readiness gate matched `bypass`, which is the status bar of ONE permission mode.
`buildPermissionArgs()` also spawns `--permission-mode auto`, `--allowedTools` and
plain `normal`, and the mode is not exposed on `GET /api/v1/sessions/:id`, so an agent
cannot know which token to expect. A non-default worker was therefore reported broken
after burning the whole ladder.
Measured one pane per mode against claude-cli 2.1.226:
--dangerously-skip-permissions -> "bypass permissions on"
--permission-mode auto -> "auto mode on"
--allowedTools Read,Grep -> "don't ask on"
(none, normal) -> "don't ask on"
--permission-mode plan -> "plan mode on"
Every one ends `(shift+tab to cycle)`, so `shift+tab` is the single space-free token
that means "the composer is up" in every mode, and it is what the ladder matches now.
Verified live end to end on a virgin case: stage 1 misses while the trust dialog is up,
stage 2 accepts it, stage 3 matches in 623ms.
⚠️ `shift+tab` contains a `+`, so it only works through `--data-urlencode`. In a
hand-built query the `+` decodes to a space and the server searches for `shift tab`,
which never appears; the response echoes `match: "shift tab"`, which is how to spot it.
Measured both ways. The stage-4 fallback (make the worker echo a split token, proving
readiness by answering rather than by chrome) stays as the last resort, and is now also
verified live: it matched in 2.5s, with the token surviving the space-less TUI intact.
Also portable ANSI stripping: the read pipelines used `sed 's/\x1b...'`, and BSD sed
(the macOS default) has no `\xHH` escape, so on macOS the strip silently removed
nothing and handed the agent raw ANSI. They now build a real ESC with `printf`.
And endpoints.md gaps: the `FORBIDDEN` 403 row and which auth responses are plain text
rather than the JSON envelope, the input size cap, the undocumented `killMux` parameter
on DELETE, and the fact that zero/negative/non-integer timeouts are rejected with a 400
rather than clamped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ship `skills/codeman` as an installable Claude Code skill rather than a
repo-only reference, and fix six defects found while verifying it live.
Install layer:
- `codeman skill install [--case <name>]` / `codeman skill uninstall`.
Case names resolve through linked-cases.json first, mirroring the
server's resolveCasePath(), so a case linked in from outside
~/codeman-cases no longer fails with "Case not found".
- applyAgentSkill() / installAgentSkillInto() / removeAgentSkillFrom() in
hooks-config.ts. Copies are marker-owned, so an unmarked user-authored
skill is never touched, and a symlinked skill dir is refused (this
repo's own .claude/skills/codeman is a symlink to the source).
- Synced `agentSkillEnabled` setting, default OFF: schemas.ts,
ports/config-port.ts, server.ts, session-routes.ts (add-only injection
on Claude session create and quick-start), plus the App Settings toggle.
Skill content fixes, each reproduced before and after:
- Fail-closed `delete_session` replaces `is_self ... || curl -X DELETE`.
Shell state does not survive between agent tool calls, and an undefined
is_self exited 127, firing the `||` branch and deleting the caller's own
session with the one guard bypassed. The request now lives inside the
guard, so a lost preamble deletes nothing.
- clientId is a fixed literal instead of `agent-$$`. The pid changes per
tool call, so the documented resend-identical-request loop stopped being
a duplicate and retyped the prompt, submitting the turn twice.
- `last-response` is now the documented read path for claude and codex
workers. It returns clean transcript text; the terminal scrape it
replaces returns a wall of TUI repaint noise. Its transcript flush lags
the stop signal, so the recipes poll it rather than reading once.
- quick-start examples branch on `.success`. Previously a failed spawn
yielded the literal session id "null" and burned the whole readiness
budget before reporting jq noise instead of the cause.
- Documented that turning `agentSkillEnabled` off sweeps nothing, and
corrected the hooks-config comment that claimed a toggle-off sweep
exists. Per-case cleanup is `codeman skill uninstall --case <name>`.
- Documented that SESSION_BUSY means the 50-session cap on quick-start,
and that caseName resolves linked cases, so a generic name can land a
worker in a real repo.
Tests: test/agent-skill.test.ts covers install, refresh, idempotence,
marker ownership and symlink refusal against the real packaged source;
test/quick-start.test.ts covers injection behind the setting.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer