Ask the Superintendent

The Superintendent is an agent that lives in a floating panel over the board. It acts on your Works only through hm commands, so everything it does lands on the same record the command line writes to. For what the role is and what it may decide, read the Superintendent.

Open the panel

1. Connect a Works. Until one is connected there is no session to open.
2. Press the Superintendent pill in the bottom-right corner of the window. Its dot pulses while the agent is working.
3. The panel opens over whatever view you were on. Opening it starts the agent, or resumes the conversation it already had with you on this Works. Closing it with the ✕ in the header stops the agent.

The header reads Superintendent · followed by the name of your Works. A Resumed tag appears when the conversation below was picked up again, not started fresh. Use Expand to make the panel larger, or drag its edges to resize it.

Ask in plain words

Type into the composer at the bottom. Its prompt reads Ask, or name an hm action, and either works: a question such as "what's in flight?" or a request such as "add a ticket to this manifest".

• Enter sends. Shift+Enter starts a new line.
• Escape stops the turn that is running. The session stays open.
• Up, with the cursor at the start of the composer, brings back what you sent before.
• If you type while a turn is still running, your message is shown as Queued and goes in when the turn finishes. A queued message is lost if you close the panel first.

Each reply ends with a footer showing when it landed, what the turn cost, and a copy button.

Commands and mentions

• Type / at the start of a message to open Commands, a list of the hm commands the agent can use, grouped by phase. Choosing one fills in the composer. Nothing runs until you send it.
• Type @ to open Seats and files. Pick a seat to address a message to it, or a file for the agent to read.

When the agent wants to change something, it does not just go ahead. It shows an approval card above the composer, covered in review a plan before it runs.

The controls above the composer

The row above the composer sets how the agent runs:

• Model picks the model this runtime uses.
• Level sets the reasoning level. Changing it restarts the agent without losing the conversation.
• Posture decides whether hm asks you before a write: Ask before writes or Run writes.

These settings apply to this session only, unless you choose Save as seat default. If your build can run more than one agent runtime, a chip in the header opens the Agent runtime menu. Switching the runtime changes only this session. The seat that plans work keeps its own runtime.

Past conversations

• Press Past in the header to list earlier sessions on this Works, with the number of turns in each and when it was last active.
• Pressing a row opens that session read-only. Back to live returns you to the current conversation.
• Resume replaces the current conversation with the one you picked. There is only one live session at a time.

When the panel is wide enough, a Messages column lists what you have sent in this session, newest first. Search messages looks through all of them, and pressing one scrolls the conversation to it.

hm superintendent          # print today's digest and the commands the agent may use
hm superintendent --new    # start a fresh session; the old one stays under Past