codewhale/docs/FLEET.md

Agent Fleet

Agent Fleet is the local-first control plane for durable multi-worker runs. The initial CLI surface is:

codewhale fleet init
codewhale fleet run tasks.json --max-workers 4
codewhale fleet status
codewhale fleet inspect <worker-id>
codewhale fleet interrupt <worker-id>
codewhale fleet restart <worker-id>
codewhale fleet stop --all

Fleet state is stored under the workspace in .codewhale/fleet.jsonl. Worker logs and adapter logs are stored under .codewhale/fleet/ and .codewhale/fleet-host/.

Task Spec

codewhale fleet run accepts JSON or TOML. A minimal JSON spec:

{
  "name": "local smoke",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "id": "lint",
      "name": "Lint",
      "instructions": "Run the lint check and report failures.",
      "expected_artifacts": ["log"]
    }
  ]
}

Workers are optional. If omitted, CodeWhale creates local worker slots up to --max-workers.

Host Adapters

The host adapter boundary supports local child processes and explicit SSH workers. Adapters expose the same operations: start, read status, read bounded logs, interrupt, restart, stop, and cleanup.

Local workers run as child processes with stdin closed and stdout/stderr written to bounded fleet host logs. They inherit only a small safe base environment such as PATH and explicitly allowlisted variables.

SSH workers run through the system ssh client with BatchMode=yes and a bounded connect timeout. Remote environment variables are sent with OpenSSH SendEnv; values are not embedded in the local ssh argv or fleet logs.

Example SSH worker spec:

{
  "id": "builder-1",
  "name": "Builder 1",
  "host": {
    "kind": "ssh",
    "host": "builder.example.com",
    "user": "codewhale",
    "port": 22,
    "identity": "~/.ssh/codewhale_fleet",
    "working_directory": "/srv/codewhale/work",
    "env_allowlist": ["CODEWHALE_PROFILE"],
    "codewhale_binary": "/usr/local/bin/codewhale"
  },
  "capabilities": ["local", "linux", "tests"],
  "max_concurrent_tasks": 1
}

Defaults are intentionally conservative:

• no hosted control plane or cloud provisioning is enabled;
• SSH requires an explicit host, working directory, and CodeWhale binary path;
• secret-like environment names such as TOKEN, SECRET, PASSWORD, API_KEY, and PRIVATE_KEY are rejected from adapter allowlists;
• secrets should remain in CodeWhale config providers or remote host config, not in task instructions, argv, or fleet logs.