Spawn

Spawn parallel Pi agents

Use this skill instead of manually opening Herdr tabs or inventing your own fan-out.

Workflow

1. Draft a short brief from the conversation (or from “on this”: summarize the current topic).
2. Present the brief in chat and ask the user to confirm: yes / edit / cancel.
3. Only after explicit confirm, call the spawn_run tool with:
   • brief: the confirmed text
   • confirmed: true
   • useDefaultSet: true for “the agents”, or names: ["…"] for a named agent
   • background: true if the user asked for background/headless
4. Synthesize the returned findings in chat. Mark missing/failed agents clearly. Do not claim they finished.
5. Follow-ups: when the user asks the same already-spawned Herdr agents “what if…?”, asks them to reconsider, or asks a direct follow-up, call spawn_follow_up instead of spawn_run. It reuses the existing child sessions and creates no tabs. Do not substitute a new spawn if no resumable Herdr run exists.
6. Investigate stragglers: for each missing agent that has a pane, use non-blocking herdr tools (herdr_agent get/read) to see whether it is stuck, blocked, waiting on usage limits, or still working.
7. Late findings: use /spawn status (or ask to check the run) and read finding files under the kept run dir. Children do not ping the parent chat.

Surfaces

• /spawn — ask what to look into, then draft → confirm → spawn_run
• /spawn <name> on this — draft from current topic for that named agent
• /spawn the agents on this — draft from current topic for the default set
• /spawn status — list kept partial runs and which findings landed
• Follow-up requests to the parent (“ask the spawned agents what if we use X?”) — call spawn_follow_up to reuse the latest Herdr tabs
• Natural language (“spawn the agents on this”, “run opus and fable on …”, “get the agents to investigate …”) — same workflow

Rules

• Never start children until the user confirms the brief.
• Never open Herdr tabs or run pi -p yourself for spawn; the tools own runtime selection (HERDR_ENV=1 → Herdr tabs, else headless; background forces headless).
• spawn_run waits until every child finishes (returns early when the last one lands). Optional timeoutMs in spawn.json is only a safety ceiling; omit/null means wait until done or cancel.
• Never call herdr_agent wait on spawn children. That freezes the parent chat. spawn_follow_up owns its own wait/collect cycle.
• Never close spawn tabs or panes, on success or failure, unless the user explicitly asks.
• Children write findings under ~/.pi/agent/spawn-runs/. Complete runs are cleaned up; partial/cancelled runs are kept for /spawn status.
• spawn_follow_up works only for Herdr children. Headless --no-session children cannot be resumed, so say so instead of starting replacement children.
• Parent owns synthesis. There are no modes, no editor/optimizer model, and no parent-pane pings.