How orders reach your agents

How an order is understood#

On your Mac

Short, plain orders (spawn 4 codex, pause Otto, kill the codex consoles, open the mission map, go to workspace 2) are read by a built-in parser and use no planner credits; a spoken confirmation that is not cached yet still uses some. With a speech language outside English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian, every order goes to the planner.

By the planner

Whole sentences, questions, and work for several agents go to Symvibe's planner service, which writes the steps and the text each agent receives. Each such order uses credits. One planner turn runs at a time per thread, and the thread says Still thinking if it takes more than a few seconds.

Typed and submitted#

• The text is pasted into the console as one line, then submitted with Return a moment later, exactly as if you had typed it.
• Only consoles running an agent receive orders. A plain shell, or an agent console that fell back to its shell, never does, so an order is never run as a shell command.
• A console that is still starting gets up to ten seconds. One that has shown nothing yet gets nothing.
• If the agent is showing a permission prompt or a question, the order waits until you answer it, for up to 15 minutes, then is dropped with a note in the thread.
• cancel that or never mind drops the parts not typed yet. Text already pasted but not submitted stays in the agent's input box, unsent.

One task, several agents#

• A review asked of several agents is split into parts. Each agent gets its own angle, with a note to read without editing files.
• The planner also gives each agent its own part of other work. If one text would still go to several agents, because the planner did not split it or the built-in parser handled the order, only one agent gets it, a free one when there is one, and the thread says how many were left free.
• Everyone gets the same text only for short directives meant for all, such as commit, stop using mocks or reply in English, or when you ask for it: “the same prompt”, “identical prompts”, “independent reviews”.

What asks before it acts#

When the planner is not available#

If the planner cannot be reached, is busy or is rate limiting (and for a minute after two failures in a row), the built-in parser handles every order. The same happens when your monthly credits run out, until they renew, or when an order is longer than 600 characters.

• Plain orders keep working, and questions get a short local answer.
• An order that starts with who it is for (Otto, run the tests, tell Otto to run the tests) or uses @ mentions goes out in your own words. If it names several agents, one free agent among them gets it, and a review is split into angles.
• An order that asks the orchestrator to write the instruction, or names a console or group the parser cannot route (for example a group named later in the sentence), is not sent.
• While the planner cannot be reached, an order that names nobody when several agents could take it is not sent either. In the other cases it goes to one free agent.

The thread says what happened: The planner didn't answer, so I sent nothing to the agents when it could not be reached (try again in a moment, or start the order with who it is for), Without the planner I can't write or split that order, so I sent nothing in the other cases, and I couldn't read that without the planner for a sentence it cannot read reliably. When credits run out, the first reply that needed the planner also says so, once per session.

Keep going#