Command & control · fleet report

The fleet stopped
asking permission

One night of work on a two-machine agent fleet: what landed, what changed about how it decides, and what it does next without being told.

7 AUG 2026 12 changes landed 347 tests passing 0 pull requests waiting

What landed

#32 A build switch, per machine. Every box can still do every job. The switch only answers whether this one should spend its cores compiling — so the laptop can hand that over and keep proposing, testing and reviewing. Default is on, including when the state file is missing or corrupt.
#36 Approved branches merge themselves. Three machine checks, no opinions: it passed review, it merges cleanly, and the suite passes again on the merge commit — the one moment where two individually-green branches reveal that they break each other. Any failure rolls the main branch back to exactly where it was.
#33 The watchdog was looking in the wrong place. It searched only for one Python environment. On the second machine that path doesn't exist, so it reported "no test command detected" every hour against a repository with 337 passing tests. A green board and no evidence behind it.
#31 The phone line remembers. Messages used to arrive as strangers — no memory of the last question, no idea what "it" referred to. Now it holds one conversation, and real tools.
#34 The deny-list learned the other operating system. It blocked the paths that matter on macOS and none of their Linux equivalents — a fence around half a garden.
— Two panes became one. The dashboard listed agents on the left and processes on the right, both saying the same thing in different words. An agent is a process. Now each agent is a heading with its own processes beneath it, and the left column belongs to the goals.

Why the heavy work moved

Not a guess. The same test suite, run on both machines within a minute of each other:

Gaia 36.6 s
Nuc 6.0 s

327 tests · identical revision · six times the iteration speed

build off Gaia — the older sister Main brain. Holds the board, the fleet jobs, the phone line, and the key to her brother's house. Thinks and steers; her cores belong to her operator. 2 cores · 4 threads · 8 GB · fanless
build on Nuc — the heavy worker Always awake, in a cupboard, cold-boots unattended. Takes the compiling, the test runs and the builds, and sends the morning report. 12 cores · 16 GB · 1.8 TB · Linux

What the operator has to read

One message, once a day, at nine in the morning, from the machine that never sleeps. What landed. What was rejected and why. What could not land. And a section headed needs you that is meant to stay empty — money, identity, and anything that cannot be undone. Everything else the fleet decides on its own.