Agent Crews — part 2 (helpers, archiving and limits)

What it is

This is part 2 of the Agent Crews — mission teams of agents that report to a lead page. Part 1 covers what a crew is, where to find it and how it behaves day to day; this page is the rest of the behaviour — what happens to helpers as a mission winds down, how a crew survives a change of lead, and the ceilings and safeties that bound it.

Where to find it

The panels themselves are on part 1: a crew session's own row, the Overseers hub, and the All-missions overview. Everything on this page is behaviour of those crews rather than a separate place to go.

How it behaves

Helpers run lean, and leave when done. A member, and any session a crew session starts, runs without the instructions written for you — no Plain Speak card, narration, answer widgets or message cards — since it writes for its lead. The lead itself keeps its full instructions but, like every crew session, is never asked for a Plain Speak card or narration either: it talks to you through the crew's cards, not a card on its own messages. A finished helper is archived by its lead, or automatically 30 minutes after its report once the lead has acted since and the helper has no unmerged work or waiting message. A helper that comes back is a helper again: waking an archived session — a message from its lead, a restart, a scheduled send — puts it straight back on its crew, header, roster and routing included, with the name it had. Only a helper that left on purpose stays gone, and a crew that has ended is never revived by a wake.

Archiving a lead asks twice, and can take its helpers with it. Archiving a lead that still has working helpers — from any close button, shortcut, swipe or bulk archive — asks you to confirm twice; cancelling either step leaves it exactly as it was. The second question offers Also archive its helpers, ticked by default: leave it ticked and the crew is filed away with its lead, each helper recorded as archived by you rather than by a sweep; clear it and they keep running without an overseer, exactly as before. Helpers that have already stopped are not counted here, so a lead whose helpers have all finished archives with no warning at all — and a helper you have deliberately put on ice (parked) is never taken by that tick; the hold outlives it.

Archiving an overseer this way is also reachable from outside the app: POST /crew/archive-members on the control server takes the same lead ids and files away the same helpers, so an agent can do what the ticked box does. Only the owner, or a lead naming its own session, may call it.

Leads come and go; the crew stays. If a lead leaves or is archived, another session can register as the new lead and take the crew over, board and roster included — and a session already on the roster does it by changing its own role once the lead has gone. A crew ends when its last live session has left, and its name becomes free again. An ended crew is not lost: a session that registers as lead with that crew's id reopens the SAME crew — tasks, log and numbering intact — unless another live crew has taken its name since. That is what keeps a hand-off safe when the outgoing lead was the crew's only member: its leave ends the crew, and its successor's registration brings it straight back. A woken former lead never returns beside the lead that replaced it.

A lead holds four helpers, and the fifth is refused before it starts. A crew is a team you can actually read, which is why a lead or a foreman reports to you through a few goal owners rather than answering every helper itself. A lead that already holds four live helpers is not given a fifth: the request is refused right away, back to the lead that asked, and the refusal names the ways forward with archiving first — archive a finished helper to free a slot, then start a foreman to hold the rest, or ask a foreman that already exists to start the helper. Archiving leads because a foreman the lead starts is itself a helper, so it is refused by the same limit. A stopped helper still counts until it is archived, so a lead cannot restart its way past the limit. Only you can raise the number, and only for one crew: an agent asking for a raise is put to you as an approval, and the raised number is forgotten when that crew ends.

An alarm when a lead stops being woken at all. A lead's heartbeat and its deep review are what bring it back to look at its crew. Turn both off while it still has helpers and the crew goes silent in a way nothing else notices — no check-in is owed, no message is waiting, the board simply stops moving. Half an hour of that raises an alarm: one line in the crew's log and one card in your inbox, telling you which lead it is, that both timers are off, and how many helpers are still reporting to it. It is one card per crew however long the clock stays dark, the card comes back if you archive it while the crew is still dark, and arming either timer clears it. A lead with no helpers left raises nothing.

Switching it off. With Agent crews off, every session routes and displays exactly as it did before, crews disappear from the Overseers hub, and the crew commands answer as if they did not exist. Heartbeats that were already set up keep running as ordinary schedules, so no mission goes silent.

Limits worth knowing. Crew names are at most 40 characters. A crew can span projects: in the hub it groups under its lead's project. The Overseer's own always-on sessions (the slot Overseers) cannot join a crew.

Related

• Agent Crews — mission teams of agents that report to a lead — what a crew is, where to find it, and the first half of how it behaves.