openrig-herdr

OpenRig decides which agents make up a view (a rig, a pod, a mission, a slice, or a saved group); herdr renders the pixels. A view opens as live, interactive terminal tiles — each tile is a nested tmux attach to a daemon-owned agent session, so you get the real session, not a snapshot. OpenRig owns the semantics; herdr owns the surface. You drive it entirely through the rig terminal CLI, which rides the installed herdr binary at arm's length — never link, embed, or plugin it.

The whole surface — three verbs

rig terminal open <view> [--provider herdr|cmux] [--json]   # herdr is the default provider
rig terminal views [--json]                                 # list openable views (saved + derived)
rig terminal status [--provider] [--json]                   # provider liveness / health

<view> resolves, in order, to one of:

• a rig name — every live agent in that rig, auto-laid-out;
• pod:<rig>/<podNamespace> — every live agent in one pod of a rig (the rig's inventory filtered by pod);
• mission:<id> — the agents working that mission (derived live from topology);
• slice:<id> — the agents working that slice (derived live);
• a saved-view name — a user-defined group (see Saved views).

Compose a view from a sentence

An agent asked "open all my rigs plus a mission as views" runs one open per target:

rig terminal open acme-web                     # a whole rig, live agents as tiles
rig terminal open mission:site-relaunch        # exactly the agents working the mission
rig terminal open slice:search-filters      # the agents working one slice

No hand-listing of seats: the mission/slice membership is derived from live topology at open time.

Read the result honestly — partial and degrade

The result is a partition — every seat lands in exactly one bucket, each named:

• opened — the live agents now showing as tiles.
• absent — seats in the view that aren't currently live: named and skipped, never silently dropped. A view that opens some of its seats is a success (the partial is disclosed) and exits 0. Only a view where no pane opens exits non-zero.
• degraded — an agent that structurally cannot tile, named with the reason. The v1 case: an agent on a host registered over HTTP has no ssh path, so its tile can't be composed — it reads as "host <id> is http-registered; tiles need ssh" and is skipped, never dropped. (ssh-reachable hosts tile via an ssh-wrapped attach; full http-host tiling is deferred to the cross-host transport seam.)

Read --json to branch on the partition programmatically; the exit code alone tells you opened-something (0) vs opened-nothing (non-zero).

Read-only — who's interactive, who's watch-only

Read-only is composed into the pane at open time — a read-only tile is a tmux attach -r, the client reports readonly=1, and it physically cannot send input. The current policy, by view kind:

• A rig view or a pod: view is interactive — you asked for that rig (or pod) directly, so you can drive its agents.
• mission: and slice: views are read-only by construction — these derived views cut across rigs; you watch and scroll, you don't keystroke into them.
• A saved view is per-member — each member carries its own readOnly (omit = interactive; true = attach -r).

So you don't have to remember to be careful: the view kind (and, for a saved view, the per-member flag) sets it at open time.

Safety rails (hard — the fleet-safety rail)

• A tile is a view (a nested tmux attach) of a daemon-owned session. Never move, join, kill, or re-parent a daemon-owned pane. Closing a tile detaches one tmux client — the daemon's session is untouched and its addressing (send/capture/nudge) is unaffected.
• Host-local read-only viewing mutates nothing. Anything that would change a live daemon session's shared state (e.g. flipping a tmux option on a running seat) is a config/design change — prove it in an isolated environment, never live-flip in production.

Scroll + copy work out of the box

On a freshly-launched agent tile the mouse wheel scrolls the pane's history and a drag-select copies to your system clipboard — with no tmux commands typed. This rides the daemon's terminal defaults (a per-session scroll option set at launch, plus the daemon tmux server's clipboard defaults). Honest timing: agents that were already running before this shipped pick up wheel-scroll at their next natural relaunch (the scroll default is per-session and running seats are never retro-flipped); system-clipboard copy works immediately (it's server-wide).

Limits — state them, don't paper over them

• Tile chrome v1 = a plain label (agent + slice). Rich per-tile status is roadmap.
• Duplicate / multi-view membership (the same agent live in two views at once) works — put the duplicates in same-size panes. Different-sized duplicate panes have an inherent tmux multi-client resize mismatch (tmux clamps to the smallest client); it is documented, not fixed — don't expect a setting to remove it.
• Inner tmux status bar is hidden by default (herdr provides the chrome); one config key (terminal.status_bar) flips it back on for raw-tmux / no-provider surfaces, and the flip applies to future launches only.

Saved views — the library (terminal-views.yaml)

In v1 you create a saved view by hand-authoring terminal-views.yaml — there is no save/write verb (open / views / status are the whole surface; a rig terminal save <id> verb is a named stretch/follow-up). You reopen it like any other view: rig terminal open <id>.

The file lives at the OpenRig home root (resolved via getDefaultOpenRigPath()), is written atomically (tmp + rename), and is byte-stable. Only hand-authored saved views live here — derived views (a rig, pod:<rig>/<pod>, mission:<id>, slice:<id>) are computed live and never written to this file.

Schema — use these field names exactly, in this order; omit optional fields when absent (never write null):

version: 1
views:
  - id: my-view-id             # required — the id `rig terminal open <id>` takes
    name: Human Name           # required
    members:
      - seat: pod-member@rig    # required — the canonical session name
        label: agent . slice    # optional — pane label
        host: some-host-id      # optional — STRUCTURED host id (NEVER a `member@rig@host` string);
                                #            omit for local. ssh-registered hosts tile;
                                #            http-registered hosts honest-degrade (named + skipped, with reason)
        tmuxSession: sessname   # optional — defaults to `seat`
        readOnly: true          # optional — omit = interactive; true = `tmux attach -r`

An agent composing a saved view on request writes this YAML and then opens the id: rig terminal open my-view-id (add --provider cmux for cmux). The library is provider-agnostic — the same saved view opens in herdr or cmux.

AGPL / clean-room

Driving herdr through the rig terminal CLI (which talks to the installed herdr binary over its CLI/socket) is arm's-length and fine. Do not link herdr's source, embed it in-process, or ship a herdr plugin — a plugin needs legal review. This skill and its docs are clean-room: patterns only, never herdr source text.