Clowder

At 181 agent sessions a day, the thing that breaks first is not the machine. It is me. Agents stop and wait, and a question that waits forty minutes for an answer has cost more than the work it was asking about.

Clowder puts the whole fleet on my phone. Every agent, what it is doing right now, which one is blocked and on what. I answer the blocked one in a sentence and it keeps going. The effect is not that I work more hours. It is that nothing idles while I am away from the desk.

What it does

• One list of every running agent, across every project.
• A decide queue: anything an agent needs a human answer for lands in one place, with enough context to answer it without opening the repository.
• Start an agent on a new piece of work, by name.
• Stop one that has gone the wrong way, before it burns an hour.
• A native iPhone app, with agents I follow on the lock screen.
• A voice call to the whole fleet when typing is too slow: I talk, a dispatcher hands the work to the agent that owns it.

Where the person stands

Nothing merges from the phone. Answering a question is not the same as approving a release, and keeping those two separate is the only reason this is safe to use. The release still happens at a desk, with the diff open.

Why it exists at all

It started as a complaint. The agents were fast and I was the queue. Building the thing that fixed that taught me more about how this way of working actually behaves than any of the systems I have shipped for clients, because I am the user and I cannot lie to myself about whether it helps.