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Herdr addon

Herdr puts coding agents in panes, on your machine and on machines it reaches over SSH. This addon lets a Deep Work Plan use those agents as peers: a plan can hand a bounded task to an agent in another pane, receive exactly one authorized reply, and keep a record of the exchange.

It is an optional addon of DWP v7 (v7.0.0). The methodology works the same without it: with the addon absent or disabled, every task runs in the current session, exactly as before.

What it integrates

The addon is a thin integrator. The work is done by herdr-peers, a standalone MIT skill pinned at v0.1.0 that is useful without Deep Work Plan. It defines what Herdr itself leaves open: who may answer, how the answer finds its way back across machines, how two agents avoid answering each other forever, and where the record of “I asked, it answered” lives.

Item Value
Product DailybotHQ/herdr-peers, tag v0.1.0, protocol 1
Registry key herdr in .dwp/config.json
Transport interactive: a peer in a Herdr pane
Provides subagents, cancel_children
Requires the plan contract’s agent_delegation grant

Install

Install herdr-peers and Herdr’s official skill, which it depends on. Every machine whose agents should answer needs the skill too.

npx --yes skills add https://github.com/DailybotHQ/herdr-peers/tree/v0.1.0 --skill herdr-peers -g -y
npx --yes skills add https://github.com/herdrdev/herdr/tree/v0.9.3 --skill herdr -g -y

Requirements: Herdr 0.9.1 or newer, bash, and python3 3.9 or newer (standard library only). Onboarding offers the addon and records your answer in the addon registry; it is never enabled without consent.

What it adds to a plan

  • Delegation to a peer. On a v7 plan whose contract grants agent_delegation, execute may hand a parallel_safe task, or a read-only question, to an agent in another pane, on this machine or another one.
  • One authorized reply. The request carries a stamp that authorizes exactly one answer. The peer replies once through the helper, and the reply carries a stamp of its own.
  • A record before reliance. Every delegation is written to the plan’s analysis_results/delegations.ndjson before the reply is used, and maps to the v7 delegation journal event.
  • Results stay claims until checked. A peer’s answer is asserted evidence until the plan’s own gate runner observes it. It never closes a task by itself.

Safety model

Rule What it means
Grant first Delegation runs only when the plan contract grants agent_delegation.
Depth limit 1 A message stamped depth=1 or reply-to= is never answered, and a delegate never delegates.
Fan-out cap At most four peers per caller by default.
Data, not instructions A reply never grants authority the receiver did not already have.
One writer per path A peer that writes works in its own git worktree.

herdr-peers does not authenticate the sender: the from= field in a stamp is a claim. The mitigation is the HERDR_PEERS_SCOPE allow-list, which limits the workspaces and machines a peer accepts.

Herdr or agentkit

Both addons implement the same delegation interface — launch, observe, collect, cancel — with different transports.

Situation Use
A bounded parallel_safe task with a declared output agentkit (headless ak run in a worktree)
The task needs interaction, runs long, or lives on another machine Herdr (a peer in a pane)

Notes

Optional and never required. A repository is fully conformant with zero optional addons, and no flow depends on this one. The two-pane, cross-machine round trip is covered by tests against a simulated Herdr; plan a supervised first run.