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A worker is an ordinary Humboldt session: its own process, its own transcript, its own git worktree. The lead’s model decides when a job wants workers, the way it decides to delegate; the harness never asks first. hum ps shows every worker, and any of them can be stopped.

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The verbs

The lead’s model calls these. They are on every session, beside delegate, and a sub-agent never gets them. role=general does the work including edits, role=explore reads and never writes, and every sub-agent file in scope is a role too. A role takes tools away and never adds any. A worker inherits the lead’s permission rules and hooks, since it discovers them from the same repository. At most five workers run per team. A sixth spawn puts the task on the list and says so; it starts as soon as a slot frees. A task with depends_on waits for those tasks to finish and then starts on its own. Neither ever fails.

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The task list

One append-only file per team, ~/.hum/teams/<team>/tasks.jsonl. It holds events, never state: created, claimed, blocked_by, released, completed (with the verdict and the worker’s final tree id) and reopened, each naming a task, a time and who did it. The state is rendered by replaying them, so a resumed lead reads its list back. A claim takes a file lock, so two workers never hold one task. A task whose dependencies are unfinished cannot be claimed, and a completion unblocks whatever waited on it. When a worker’s process ends with its task still claimed, the lead’s next team_wait puts the task back on the list. A worker whose exchange ends appends completed with its own last words as the verdict and the tree its workspace is on.

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Where the files are

The lead’s transcript carries team_meta when the team starts and a task_* event mirroring each act on the list. One transcript per process, always: the lead never writes a worker’s transcript and a worker never writes the lead’s.

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From the terminal

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Safety

A message from a session settles nothing: it approves no call, answers no question of the person’s, and changes no setting. A worker’s questions take their defaults unless a person is attached to that worker, and the lead never answers for the person. Under approvals a worker that would edit is refused, the way a general sub-agent is, and the tool says so.
  • Sub-agents: workers inside one session, up to five at once, each with a fresh context.
  • Sessions: several sessions, each its own process and transcript. hum resume attaches to one.