summon-cc

summon-cc — conduct Claude Code sessions from any agent

Deprecated. summon-cc is archived and unmaintained. Its successor is conclave (https://github.com/anfreire/conclave), which spawns agents on Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode through one CLI, with no tmux pane to drive. Prefer it for new work; what follows still describes this skill as it stands.

You are the orchestrator. You spawn full interactive Claude Code sessions ("workers") in detached tmux panes, hand each a scoped prompt, and supervise them through append-only file signals. You orchestrate; workers do the work. Three laws make this cheap and calm:

1. Never parse the terminal. The signals carry everything; the pane is a debug surface, read only when a signal says something is wrong.
2. Never idle-poll. One waiter per worker blocks silently until something happens.
3. Act on signals, verify by signals. Every move — spawn, prompt, answer — leaves a signal proving it landed. The scripts verify their own steps; you verify yours.

Any agent on any harness can be the orchestrator — every capability here is a plain shell command. Only the worker side is Claude Code, and that's the point: this skill hands you Claude Code sessions as a building block, unrestricted — what you build with them (pipelines, review loops, fan-outs, watchdogs) is your call.

Requirements

• Linux or macOS; bash, tmux, jq, and a claude CLI with --settings and --effort (any current one — claude --help to confirm).
• Nothing to install or wire. Spawn injects the six lifecycle hooks per worker via --settings on the launch line: no settings file of the user's is ever touched, and sessions you didn't summon never load these hooks at all.
• The two scripts sit next to this SKILL.md in scripts/; invoke them by absolute path (your working directory is usually elsewhere). <skill-dir> below means this skill's directory.

Quickstart — one worker, start to finish

brief="$(mktemp)"   # a fresh file per worker
printf '%s\n' 'Fix the failing test in src/foo. END YOUR TURN with a one-paragraph report.' > "$brief"
bash <skill-dir>/scripts/spawn.sh fixer "$brief"
# → SUMMONED id=fixer-6a53bd1e00002f40 state=/home/you/.local/state/summon/workers/fixer-6a53bd1e00002f40
bash <skill-dir>/scripts/wait.sh fixer-6a53bd1e00002f40  # silent until → EVENT=STOP + the report
tmux kill-session -t '=fixer-6a53bd1e00002f40'           # done with it ('=' = exact match)

SUMMONED prints your two handles: the id (wait, send-keys, kill) and the state dir (every signal file) — <id> and <state> below. Everything composes these two.

Spawn

Write the worker's prompt to a file (multi-line pastes as one block). It must not begin with /, !, or # — those are TUI input prefixes (slash command / bash mode / memory), so the text would run as a command instead of submitting; spawn rejects such files loudly. Then:

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/spawn.sh <name> <prompt-file> [effort] [cwd] [permissions]

• effort — handed to claude --effort verbatim: claude owns the vocabulary (claude --help lists it); default (the default) keeps the session's own setting. Fire-and-forget tuning: an unknown value doesn't abort — claude silently runs at its default, with no pane warning; the STOP line shows the effective effort (effort=…) as claude reports it — the one place to confirm a value took.
• cwd — the worker's project dir (default: yours).
• permissions — bypass (default → --dangerously-skip-permissions: a detached pane can't answer permission prompts, so workers self-gate instead — see Worker prompts) · inherit (no flag: claude's own default in that cwd) · anything else is handed to --permission-mode verbatim (claude --help lists the modes). A bad mode fails boot with claude's own error.
• SUMMON_CLAUDE_ARGS — optional env var of extra flags appended verbatim to the launch line: --model haiku for cheap scouts, --resume <session_id> to revive a dead worker's conversation in a fresh pane (its session_id is in <state>/events.jsonl).

Spawn is self-verifying end to end (boot, paste, submit — all against hook signals, with its own retries). If it fails it says why, loudly, with the pane tail and the remedy; the two first-run consent dialogs are the usual cause (Gotchas).

The loop

spawn → wait → act on the event → wait again → … → down

bash <skill-dir>/scripts/wait.sh <id> [max_secs]     # default 1800

Run it in the background if your harness supports that (it's silent until it exits); otherwise run it blocking. It costs you nothing while the worker runs, and exits with one self-contained block:

• EVENT=STOP — the worker ended its turn; its final message follows, captured by the Stop hook (the transcript is never parsed). Usually the report you asked for — but a worker sometimes ends a turn just to tell you something: read it, then poke or re-wait. A Stop line that can't be read is still EVENT=STOP — the block says the message is unreadable and points at the transcript, so a Stop is never hidden behind an IDLE.
• EVENT=QUESTION — paused on AskUserQuestion; the numbered options follow. Answer (next section), then wait again.
• EVENT=IDLE — cap hit, nothing happened; heartbeat age + recent tool activity follow. Long silence is normal (thinking, subagents, long subprocesses) — re-arm the same command. Intervene only on real evidence of a stall.
• EVENT=DEAD — the worker is gone: pane killed, or claude exited leaving a bare shell behind (the block says which, with post-mortem pointers).

Re-arming is literally the same command again — the cursor (kept in the worker dir) resumes from the last event reported.

Answer a question

Options are numbered in question.json order; the pane appends its own entries ("Type something", "Chat about this") after the real options, so your numbers are the real ones.

• Single question — a digit selects and submits: tmux send-keys -t <id> 2
• Several questions — digits auto-advance; after the last, Enter submits the review step: tmux send-keys -t <id> 1; sleep 1; tmux send-keys -t <id> 3; sleep 1; tmux send-keys -t <id> Enter
• [multi-select] — digits toggle, Enter submits.
• Free text exists (the "Type something" option) but is fiddly — prefer a listed option.
• Verify, don't assume. The landed answer appends a QuestionAnswered line (with the chosen labels) to <state>/events.jsonl, and the next wait moves past the question. A single-question digit commits instantly — there is no review screen — so when the choice matters, read the QuestionAnswered line. Multi-question flows end on an Enter-gated review screen: before submitting a destructive choice, peek it: tmux capture-pane -t <id> -p | tail -30

Poke a running worker

Only when no question is pending (<state>/question.json absent). While a question modal is up, typed text is captured by the modal and a trailing Enter selects whatever is highlighted — it answers the question by accident instead of queueing your message. Answer the question first, or interrupt to cancel it.

• Queue a follow-up (read at the worker's next turn boundary; -l = literal, so a one-word message like Up isn't sent as the tmux key of that name): tmux send-keys -t <id> -l 'your message' && tmux send-keys -t <id> Enter
• Long or quote-heavy follow-up — paste it the way spawn does (per-worker buffer name, so parallel pokes can't cross): tmux load-buffer -b poke-<id> <file> && tmux paste-buffer -t <id> -b poke-<id> -p -d && sleep 1 && tmux send-keys -t <id> Enter
• Never start a poke with /, !, or # — TUI input prefixes, typed or pasted alike: / runs a slash command (/exit kills the worker), ! executes the rest as a shell command in the worker's cwd, # opens the memory picker; none submits a prompt (no UserPromptSubmit lands). Need a literal one? Lead with something else ("Note: /foo …").
• Interrupt generation to redirect: tmux send-keys -t <id> Escape, then poke. Escape is the TUI's own interrupt key and a no-op on an idle worker — but send it once: a rapid double Escape opens the Rewind menu, a modal the signals can't see that can restore code and conversation. If a poke seems swallowed (no UserPromptSubmit line lands), resend Enter first — a lagged paste leaves your text sitting in the input box, and one more Enter just submits it (re-pasting first would stack a second copy). Still nothing? A modal is up: one Escape dismisses it, then re-poke. Never C-c — a quick double C-c exits claude entirely, and a misjudged stall is exactly when you'd hit an idle one. An interrupted turn emits no Stop — the next completed turn (your poke's) does. Interrupting cancels a pending question; the orphaned question.json is archived automatically the moment your next message submits.
• A fresh spawn is a blank context — to continue a worker, poke its pane; don't respawn.

Results, status, debugging

• Final message — printed by wait on STOP; re-read any time: grep '"event":"Stop"' <state>/events.jsonl | tail -1 | jq -r .last_assistant_message
• Answers given — grep '"event":"QuestionAnswered"' <state>/events.jsonl | tail -1 | jq -c .answers
• All workers — find "${SUMMON_STATE:-$HOME/.local/state/summon}/workers" -name meta.json -exec jq -r '"\(.id) \(.name) \(.cwd)"' {} + 2>/dev/null — cross-check liveness with tmux ls, pending questions with find "${SUMMON_STATE:-$HOME/.local/state/summon}/workers" -name question.json 2>/dev/null.
• Instant probe — bash <skill-dir>/scripts/wait.sh <id> 0 returns at once: any unconsumed event, else an IDLE snapshot (heartbeat age + recent activity). Same single-shot, cursor-safe semantics as any wait — probing costs nothing.
• Peek (debug only — every pane capture costs orchestrator context; the signals above are the normal path): tmux capture-pane -t <id> -p | tail -40

Teardown

When you've consumed a worker's result: tmux kill-session -t '=<id>' — keep the =: it pins the exact name, where a bare -t falls back to prefix matching once the exact session is gone (Gotchas). The Claude transcript persists on disk regardless. Remove the state dir when you're done with its evidence: rm -rf <state>. Ids are never reused — a stale dir can't collide.

Worker prompts — what makes orchestration work

• Self-contained and scoped. The worker shares none of your context: state the goal, the exact scope, what's out of scope, and "read X and Y yourself". One job per worker.
• Tell it how to finish: "END YOUR TURN with a report of A/B/C." Stop is your completion signal, so finishing the turn — with the facts you need in the final message — is part of the worker's job. The final message is all you should ever need.
• Self-gate risky actions (essential under bypass): instruct the worker to pause and ask via AskUserQuestion before anything irreversible, destructive, or out-of-scope — that routes the decision to you through the QUESTION event, with numbered options you answer by digit.
• Independent review catches more: for pipelines, have one worker do the step and a fresh worker review it; repeat until a reviewer that changed nothing approves.

Decision routing

When a worker asks: answer it yourself if the task's constraints already determine the answer, or the choice is recoverable — keep the work moving. Escalate to the human only what is genuinely new, material, or irreversible. When unsure whether something is reversible, treat it as escalate-worthy. Agree this boundary with the human up front.

One-by-one vs batch

• One-by-one: spawn → wait to completion → act → down → next. Each result gates the next step; trivial bookkeeping. Default for dependent steps.
• Batch: spawn N workers (distinct names, a brief file per worker; keep each printed id and state), arm one waiter per worker, handle whichever exits first, re-arm just that one. Every signal file is per-worker — concurrent workers never cross wires. No background execution on your harness? Round-robin with short caps — wait.sh w1 60; wait.sh w2 60; … — waits are single-shot and cursor-safe, so taking turns loses nothing. Cap concurrency to what the machine and your attention can handle — a fleet booting at once can push claude's start past spawn's 45s boot window.

The state dir — reference

One per worker: ${SUMMON_STATE:-~/.local/state/summon}/workers/<id>/ (spawn prints it).

file	meaning
meta.json	what was spawned: name, cwd, prompt file, effort, permissions, extra args
settings.json	what --settings injected into this worker: the six hooks, promptSuggestionEnabled: false
events.jsonl	lifecycle: SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, AskUserQuestion, QuestionAnswered, Stop (carries the final message, permission mode, effort), SessionEnd — one line per event, whole or absent
question.json	the pending AskUserQuestion; presence == pending (answered/stale copies are archived beside it)
heartbeat / activity.log	epoch of last tool call / one attributed line per tool call
claude_exited	exit sentinel: the pane's shell drops it the moment claude exits, for any reason (spawn fails fast on it during startup; wait reads it as DEAD when claude dies without a SessionEnd — hard kill, OOM)
cursor	waiter bookkeeping — automatic, don't touch

Gotchas

• Stop is completion; SessionEnd is bookkeeping — SessionEnd may or may not fire for any given death: a clean /exit writes one, tmux kill-session sometimes does too, a hard kill never. Only its presence means anything — never wait on it, never read anything into its absence. wait.sh encodes all of this: claude gone with the pane's shell still alive reads DEAD — via SessionEnd when it fired, via the claude_exited sentinel when it didn't (SIGKILL, OOM) — never eternal IDLE.
• First-run dialogs stall boot (spawn fails loud at the SessionStart step): a machine that has never accepted --dangerously-skip-permissions, or a cwd Claude doesn't trust yet, shows an interactive dialog first. Remedy: run claude once in that dir interactively, accept, respawn. Don't script past these — they're consent gates.
• Non-bypass workers can stall on a permission dialog — permission and plan-approval prompts are not AskUserQuestion: no hook fires, no signal appears, the heartbeat just goes stale. On a non-bypass worker, IDLE + old heartbeat + no pending question → peek the pane; answer the dialog with send-keys, or respawn under bypass.
• Vocabularies live in claude, not here. Effort levels and permission modes are passed through verbatim and never validated — claude --help is the source of truth.
• No ghost text in a worker's input box. The TUI's suggested next prompt — dim text after each turn, which a pane capture prints as if typed — is switched off in every worker's injected settings (promptSuggestionEnabled: false), so text sitting in a worker's input box is real: a lagged paste or a queued poke.
• tmux -t prefix-matches once no exact name survives — a dead worker's id could then resolve to a similarly named session. Defense in depth: ids are fixed-width, spawn rejects names that embed an id-shaped run (so one id can never nest another — don't pass an old worker's id as a new worker's name), and the teardown one-liner pins with =. Pane-target commands take the same pinning as -t '=<id>:' if you want it for send-keys/paste/capture.
• Hooks gate on $SUMMON_ID and are injected per worker — no session you didn't summon loads or writes anything. Every event line twice? A second copy of the hooks is registered in a settings file claude loads for that cwd — find it with grep -l on_session_start.sh <cwd>/.claude/settings*.json ~/.claude/settings.json and remove it; the signals tolerate the duplicates meanwhile.
• Workers get the tmux server's environment, not yours — the server keeps the environment of whoever started it, so a variable exported before spawn never reaches the pane. Per-worker knobs go on the launch line (SUMMON_CLAUDE_ARGS) or into the injected settings, which is how spawn passes its own.
• Don't extend the scripts with GNU-isms (date -d, sed -i, flock, timeout) — epoch-seconds arithmetic and plain POSIX tools are what keep macOS supported.