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DevSwarm workspaces

DevSwarm is a desktop app that runs several coding-agent workspaces side by side, each on its own branch, driven from a hivecontrol CLI. anti-hall has an optional integration for it.

Optional and dormant

Nothing here runs unless you are in a DevSwarm session or have installed one of its companions. The rest of anti-hall does not depend on it.

The idea

One session is the Primary: it plans the work and hands features or fixes to child workspaces. Each child works on its own branch and reports back. anti-hall handles the parts that go wrong when many agents run at once.

Area What anti-hall does
Messages The Primary and its children talk through one mailbox per session, kept by anti-hall (scripts/devswarm.js send, inbox, roster). DevSwarm's own messaging is blocked so nothing is lost or read twice.
One Primary There is one Primary per project. A new session takes the seat only when the holder has closed.
Visibility Each turn, the Primary sees a table of its workspaces: title, state, pull request, unread messages. It is not allowed to stop with unread or unanswered questions.
Recovery A stuck child is handled in layers: the child reports itself, a supervisor nudges it, then the Primary is told. The automatic path never kills a session; only the on-demand devswarm-recover command does.
Finishing A child that is merged runs devswarm.js done. When the merge is proven (its commit is on the default branch), the workspace is archived automatically (DevSwarm 2.5.3 or newer). Deleting archived workspaces needs your approval.
Ground truth anti-hall reads the DevSwarm app's own database (read-only) to know which workspaces exist, are archived, or have a pull request.

Optional companions

These are background helpers you install yourself; nothing installs them for you.

Companion What it does Install from plugins/anti-hall/companion/
Liveness supervisor Checks every 90 seconds for stuck workspaces and nudges them. node install-devswarm-supervisor.js
Ingest daemon Reads DevSwarm's workspace messages continuously and files them into anti-hall's message store. node install-devswarm-ingest.js

They run as a launchd agent on macOS, or a systemd user unit on Linux (cron when systemctl is missing). Uninstall with --uninstall (Uninstall).

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