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 -yRequirements: 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,executemay hand aparallel_safetask, 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.ndjsonbefore the reply is used, and maps to the v7delegationjournal event. - Results stay claims until checked. A peer’s answer is
assertedevidence 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.