Watching a campaign

piloop watch shows the campaign on one screen, with keys to act on it.

piloop watch is a terminal app over the database. It shows every project, or one project with piloop watch <project>. It reads the database again whenever the daemon or an agent writes to it.

The screens

The first screen lists every project, the active ones first. Press enter to open one, and esc to come back.

It shows one row per project: its status, the head and its gain over the baseline, the live agents, the ready ideas, the inbox, the tokens and the last event.

A project has a header, four panels on the left, and the main pane on the right, which shows the selected row in full:

These screens are from the enwik8 example campaign after its 10 runs. The Candidates panel, with the head selected:

The Ideas panel, with an idea that research wrote from the losses it measured:

The header shows the head, the number of keeps and the tokens. The second line shows the progress against [stop], and the spend against [spend] when the project has a budget. With several tracks, one more line shows each track.

Panels and keys

These keys work on the screen of a project. ? and q also work on the list of projects.

Key	Action
1 to 4, tab	Move between the panels.
0	Move into the main pane, to scroll it.
↑ ↓, j k	Select a row.
/	Filter the panel. enter applies the filter, esc clears it.
?	List the keys of the panel.
esc	Go back to the list of projects.
q	Quit.

Panel	Rows	Main pane	Keys
[1] Inbox	The unacknowledged items, most urgent first, without the items that you wrote.	The item and its thread.	a acknowledge, A acknowledge every item shown, r reply
[2] Agents	The running agents: ● working, ○ idle, ◐ waiting on a dialog.	The agent, its task, and its last 60 lines of output.	enter open its Herdr tab, s steer (both with the Herdr runtime)
[3] Ideas	Seeds, then proposed, ready, scheduled and parked ideas, and by priority within each status.	Hypothesis, plan, links, runs and comments.	y approve, p park, x reject, + - priority
[4] Candidates	The candidates, newest first, then the imported references. The title shows the head after each keep as a sparkline.	Verdict and reason, metrics against the parent, summary.	none

What the keys write

Each key writes as PILOOP_ACTOR, which is human unless you set it. The events table records the write like any other.

• Acknowledge does what piloop inbox ack does.
• Reply asks for the text and a priority (default 2). It writes a decision comment that replies to the first item of the thread. The orchestrator’s next wait returns with it, and the orchestrator acknowledges it after it applies it.
• Steer types text into the agent’s pane, as piloop prompt does. It needs the Herdr runtime. Herdr refuses while the agent waits on a dialog. Press enter to go to the agent’s tab and answer the dialog.
• Approve, park and reject ask why. Each one writes the status change and a note on the idea with the reason. A seed cannot be approved: research develops it into an idea first (piloop idea develop).

In Herdr

By default, the agents run as background processes. To see every agent in a terminal pane, install Herdr and set runtime = "herdr" in piloop.toml. Then piloop has its own Herdr session, piloop, with one workspace for each project. The first tab of a workspace is home: a shell on the left and piloop watch <project> on the right. Each agent gets its own tab, named after its role, its id and its idea:

my-project
  home                                shell │ piloop watch
  worker-12 idea#5 Stacking with a meta-learner…
  research-7
  watchdog-13

piloop attach <worker-id> opens an agent’s tab from any terminal.