nodecode-muster

Muster: a live board of every subagent flight - working, stuck, failing on repeat or gone - with a stop and a message. A Nodecode rewrite of jollyroger1480/muster by jollyroger1480.

Every (fork "task" ...) a turn starts is a flight, and Nodecode already publishes how each fork of a running call stands. Muster reads that one fact, keeps a row per flight under the home, and answers the questions the original answered: who is still working, who has gone quiet, which job keeps failing, and which ones died with the image that ran them. It also acts on a row: a flight can be stopped, or sent a message it reads at its next step.

Nothing is dialled and nothing leaves the machine: the ledger is one JSON document under the Nodecode home, and the only actions are the kernel's own in-process ones.

Get it

Tell the agent "add the muster cell", or run nodecode add nc://muster.

Set it up

Nothing is required. The board starts empty and fills itself. The muster section of ~/.nodecode/config.jsonc (/settings, or the file; config.example.jsonc has the shape) moves where the ledger lives and what counts as stuck or as a repeat failure:

"muster": {
  "stall_seconds": 300,        // no frame for this long reads stuck
  "spin_threshold": 3,         // failures of the same job that read as "failing on repeat"
  "spin_window_seconds": 1800,
  "show_goals": true,         // false keeps the jobs off a shared screen
  "board_rows": 40,
  "auto_requeue": true,       // re-run a job that ended badly, in its own session
  "max_requeues": 2,          // and no more often than this
  "dir": "~/notes/muster/"    // ledger folder; muster/ under the home unless answered
}

A value out of range refuses the start, naming the member; a ledger that will not read refuses it too, rather than being quietly replaced.

Use it

/muster draws the board:

muster: 2 working, 1 stuck

> working  "1f3c9a2b"  audit the retry loop
    busy - 12 tool calls, last heard 8s ago
! stuck    "7d0e1a44"  index the corpus
    silent for 11m with nothing in progress - probably stuck.
    stop it: /muster stop 7d0e1a44

/muster stop ID stops that flight's turn through the kernel, and says what the kernel answered rather than claiming a stop it did not get.
/muster note ID MESSAGE sends a running flight a message (a steer): it reads it at its next step.
/muster help lists the verbs. /muster-digest is the report: the four counts, then only the flights that need a decision, one line each.

The model has the same two surfaces as tools: muster_status (the board, and which flights answer to which command) and muster_digest (the report). (help :muster) carries the whole of it.

What the states mean:

working - the flight's call is still running and frames keep arriving.
stuck - no frame for stall_seconds and nothing in progress. The next frame unsticks it: the badge is never sticky.
failing on repeat - the same job failed spin_threshold times inside spin_window_seconds.
gone - the row was still live when a previous image stopped: found at the next start, and it needs a re-run.
done / failed / cut short / stopped - how it ended.

A job that ended badly is run again in its own session, up to max_requeues times, because a retry is what the original did; set auto_requeue to false to watch only.

Test it

NODECODE_SRC=... .github/test-cell.sh tools/nodecode-muster

The tests start and stop the cell, feed it fork frames by hand, move a row's clock to prove a quiet row is stuck and a fresh frame heals it, stub the in-process ingress to prove one bad ending is run again exactly once, and read the board, the command and the digest.

Gaps

No token or cost column: the fork progress frame carries no token counts, and a price read off nothing would be invented. The original's rates and ceiling settings have no counterpart here.
No dashboard pane, desktop chip or status-bar counter: Nodecode's own transcript already draws the forks of a running call, and a cell does not paint the TUI.
Flights are the forks of a running call. A turn a person starts by hand in another session is not a flight and does not appear.