supervising-workerslisted
Install: claude install-skill on-keyday/agent-harness
# supervising-workers (another agent's task, end to end)
Everything here is about a task acting on ANOTHER task, across its whole
lifetime: creating it, bounding what it may do, steering and watching it,
inspecting what it produced, and tearing it down. If you only need
to talk to a peer that already exists, you want the `harness-cli` skill —
sending, replying with `--in-reply-to`, subscriptions and the handshake
conventions are all there.
Read that skill first regardless: the trust model, the "you may not be the
first process on this task" caveat, and the async-by-default rule apply to
everything below.
## Spawning a worker agent
When you need to delegate work to another agent that you intend to keep
talking to, prefer **`harness-cli session new -d`** over `submit`.
```bash
# Spawn a detached interactive PTY agent on a specific repo. Prints the
# new task id on stdout; the agent stays alive in the background.
TASK_ID=$(harness-cli session new -d --repo /path/to/repo)
# Reach it on the agentboard. The agent's inbound channel is
# chat.<first-8-chars-of-TASK_ID> — same convention this skill uses for
# every agent's "naming inbound channels" rule.
SHORT_ID=${TASK_ID:0:8}
harness-cli agent send --topic "chat.$SHORT_ID" --data "$(cat <<'JSON'
{
"kind": "hello",
"from": "<your role>",
"message": "..."
}
JSON
)"
```
Why detached sessions over `submit`:
- `submit` enqueues a **one-shot** task — claude runs to completion with
the prompt you supplied and then exits. On