Tower

The orchestrator skill decides who does what. This skill decides where they run: one Herdr pane per child, visible to the user, instead of invisible background subagents.

Gate first:

test "${HERDR_ENV:-}" = 1

If the check fails, say the session is not inside Herdr and fall back to the orchestrator's own substrate. Do not run any herdr command.

Commands

• tower on — orchestrator mode with this substrate. Loads orchestrator and herdr if they are not already in context.
• tower off — same as orchestrator off.
• tower status — the orchestrator status check, with pane states from Herdr.

What stays the same

Everything the orchestrator skill defines: the three slots, personas, routing rules, the delegation brief, the war room table, the stall cap, and the safety rules. Read them there. This file replaces only the "Child Agent Substrate" section. The herdr skill remains the authority for CLI syntax and safety.

Substrate mapping

Orchestrator step	Tower
Spawn a child	pane split (or tab create for an executor), then agent start <name> --kind claude --pane <id>
Continue a child	agent prompt <name> "<text>" --wait --timeout <ms>
Status check	agent list; per child agent get <name>
Read a closeout	agent read <name> --source recent-unwrapped --lines 200
Worktree isolation	worktree create --branch <name> for the executor's workspace
Stall	agent_status unchanged across two status checks

Naming

The agent name is the war room key: <branch-or-key>-<slot>, lowercase, hyphens, under 32 chars. auth-exec, auth-audit, search-survey. The name follows the pane occupant, so the same child answers follow-up prompts on that branch, and agent list reads as the roster.

Placement

• Surveyors and auditors are short-lived: split beside the calling pane with --no-focus, right when wide, down when tall, and close the pane after the closeout is recorded.
• Executors are long-lived and own a branch: give each its own tab, labelled with the branch, so its transcript is not fighting for space. Use a worktree workspace when two executors are mutating at once.
• Never create a workspace, tab, or pane the user did not ask for beyond these rules, and never close one this session did not create.

Dispatch

herdr pane split --current --direction right --cwd "$PWD" --no-focus
herdr agent start auth-exec --kind claude --pane <returned-pane-id>
herdr agent prompt auth-exec "<delegation brief>" --wait --timeout 600000

Wait for agent start to return ready before prompting. The delegation brief is the orchestrator's, verbatim, plus one line: "Finish your closeout as a short Markdown block so it can be read from the terminal."

Waiting

agent prompt --wait blocks this session on one child. With several children active, put each wait in a background Bash call, or prompt without --wait and use agent wait <name> --timeout <ms> at the next status check. A timeout does not prove the prompt was lost; read the pane before re-sending.

Blocked children

A child in blocked has a permission dialog or a question on screen. Do not answer it. Report the row as blocked, name the pane so the user can look, and route the decision to the user. This is the visibility the substrate exists for.

Reading results

Read the closeout with agent read. If the transcript is longer than the read returns, ask the child to write the closeout to a Markdown file in a temporary directory and reply with the path, then read that file. Findings from surveyors and auditors still come back to this session, and this session routes any fix to the owning executor.

War room table

Same four columns. Put the agent name in the Next cell on the first row for a branch so it survives summarization:

| auth | executor (backend) | working | pane auth-exec: migration in progress |

Success criteria

• tower on inside Herdr yields a war room where every child is a visible pane.
• Outside Herdr it degrades to the orchestrator's own substrate with one line of notice.
• Same-branch follow-ups go to the same named agent.
• A blocked child reaches the user, not an automatic answer.
• Nothing in orchestrator or herdr is duplicated here beyond the table above.