gangline

Install

$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adambiggs/gangline/main/install.sh | sh

Needs git and tmux ≥ 3.2. Clones to ~/.local/share/gangline, links gang into ~/.local/bin, re-run to update. Piping a stranger's script into a shell is your call to make — read it first, or clone and symlink bin/gang yourself; the installer does nothing more.

How it works

Agents are tmux windows.

Spawning is new-window, killing is kill-window, watching is capture-pane, and the window name is the agent's identity. Attach and you are looking at your team — the pane is the transcript, and you can type into it yourself at any time.

Every message is attributed and verified.

A send carries a [gang:<sender>] prefix, is confirmed by capturing the pane, and only then submitted. No sender means no send. Unverified means a loud failure, never a shrug.

Agents manage their own context.

A model cannot feel its own token count, so the substrate measures it and warns at configurable bands. The agent compacts itself at the next clean seam, queuing a resume directive behind the compaction so work continues unattended.

A new harness costs a profile, not an integration.

Launch command, busy marker, compact command — about ten lines. Everything else is universal. Profiles scrape the stock TUI: a theme or UI extension that repaints it takes a shadow profile of your own (GANG_PROFILES), re-verified against what you actually run.

Batteries included, every one replaceable.

Agents spawn with a role brief — lead, worker, reviewer. Point GANG_ROLES at a directory of your own and any brief becomes yours.

Delivery is measured, not assumed

A send is three reads of the target's input box, not a spray of keystrokes. gang reads the box, pastes, and reads again — the box must have changed. Enter goes in as its own keystroke, and a third read confirms the submit.

Matching the text somewhere on screen would verify against an identical earlier send still sitting in the transcript; a box that changed is the harness-independent fact underneath every TUI's rendering, whether it echoes a paste literally or collapses it into [Pasted text #2]. And the separate Enter matters: batch text and newline into one burst and a TUI reads the newline as part of the paste, parking your message in the box as an unsent draft that scrollback renders exactly like a sent one. If any read disagrees, the send dies loudly — and nothing was submitted.

Context is measured, not felt

Measure, warn, act — the substrate does the first two, the agent does the third. Usage is read through each harness's own introspection: a statusline beacon, a painted readout, or the session file the harness itself writes. Two warning legs run the same band ladder over that one readout — an in-turn hook where the harness has hooks, an ambient cron patrol where it doesn't — and share one band memory, so an agent is warned once per band, not once per leg.

[gang:patrol] [context-usage] 187k/272k (69%) in context — crossed the
180000-token band. At the next checkpoint (arc boundary), run:
gang compact worker --from worker --resume '<where you are, what is next>'
— it queues behind the turn you are in, and the resume is delivered once
compaction settles.

The agent then compacts itself at the next clean seam — tests green, a commit made — without being idle first and without anyone watching. The --resume never rides the input queue behind its own compaction, where the turn about to be compacted could swallow it; a detached waiter delivers it at the first moment it cannot be overtaken, and the agent picks it up the instant it has a context to pick it up into.

Loud refusals, never guesses

gangline's failure mode is a refusal you can read, not a guess you can't.

$ gang send reviewer --from lead "ship it"
gang: refusing to deliver 'ship it': reviewer is gated (hook set) — a
permission prompt only the operator can answer owns the screen (gang attach)

• Gated agents take no keystrokes from anyone. A harness stopped at a permission prompt is waiting on the operator, and a send would answer the dialog — so every delivery path refuses, and patrol names the gate loudly as what the team is waiting on.
• Nudges hold for churning panes and half-typed drafts. Patrol injects only into a pane that is byte-identical across two captures with an empty input box. Holding costs one sweep; interleaving costs the turn.
• An unread context window is admitted, not hidden. A readout gang cannot reach shows as - in the roster and is reported as not patrolled, never quietly skipped.
• Scrape drift is diagnosed, not endured. Every scraped marker is pinned to live-verified harness versions; gang doctor exits nonzero on drift — and says so when a clean bill can't explain misbehavior, because version pins don't watch your UI mods.

The verbs

Extend it

A profile says how to talk to a harness; a role says what an agent is for. They are the same kind of extension point, and neither is an integration.

• A profile is a few lines of shell declaring what gang cannot know generically: launch command, busy marker, compact command, how the permission prompt reads, optional hooks for the context readout and the input box. Markers nobody has watched live stay unset, and gang takes the slower, safer branch rather than guessing.
• A role is a markdown brief — lead splits work and guards its own context hardest, worker reports what changed and what proves it, reviewer verifies claims rather than reading diffs. The brief is pointed at, not pasted, so it survives compaction.
• Both are shadowed, not patched. GANG_PROFILES and GANG_ROLES are searched before the shipped directories, so a new harness — or a fix for a TUI that moved under you — costs a file of the same name, never surgery on the installed tree.

The trail

The vocabulary is mushing, and every term names something real in the system — the musher's field guide maps all of it. A sample:

Of the 1925 serum run's lead dogs, Togo ran the long, dangerous leg while Balto got the statue — credit your working dogs.