Fleet mode

A fleet runs a whole milestone in parallel. Each epic becomes a lane (its own worktree + pane + branch). A short-lived command — hordr fleet check — advances every lane one step: dispatch, await, rollup, merge. There is no long-running daemon.

Plan the milestone

Decompose into epics and tasks. Each epic is a parallel lane; tasks within an epic are serialized.

# the milestone
beans create "Ship onboarding" -t milestone
# → hordr-MS

# epics (each becomes a lane)
beans create "Auth"        -t epic --parent hordr-MS
beans create "Profile"     -t epic --parent hordr-MS --blocked-by hordr-AUTH-EPIC

# tasks inside an epic, chained into a pipeline
beans create "Implement X" -t task --parent hordr-AUTH-EPIC --assigned implementer
beans create "Test X"      -t task --parent hordr-AUTH-EPIC --assigned tester     --blocked-by hordr-IMPL
beans create "Review X"    -t task --parent hordr-AUTH-EPIC --assigned reviewer   --blocked-by hordr-TEST

Always set assigned: on tasks. Missing assigned: defaults to implementer with a warning; an unresolvable role blocks the task.

Create and advance

hordr fleet create hordr-MS      # creates the milestone worktree + lanes
hordr fleet check                # one broker pass over every lane (run repeatedly)
hordr fleet status               # see where each lane is

fleet check is idempotent and safe to run on a timer or by hand. Each pass:

1. Scans lanes, creates worktrees lazily for newly-unblocked epics.
2. Dispatches the next ready task in each free lane.
3. Awaits in-flight agents; on /done it rolls up status.
4. Merges a completed epic into the milestone integration branch, then tears down its lane (worktree remove + git branch -d).
5. When every epic is done, finishes the fleet: merges the integration branch into primary and tears it down too.

Cross-epic dependencies

A --blocked-by epic gets no worktree until its blocker merges. When it unblocks, its worktree branches from the milestone integration branch — which now contains the blocker’s code. Lazy creation is dependency resolution.

The 3-tier merge

Epic → integration branch merges use three tiers (ADR-0014):

1. git merge --ff-only — clean fast-forward.
2. git merge --no-ff — merge commit.
3. Conflict — left in-progress; hordr spawns a merger agent to resolve, then resumes.

Recoverable states

A lane that hits trouble doesn’t die — it parks:

• merging — merger agent resolving a conflict.
• uncommitted — dirty worktree at teardown; recover the work, then reset.
• blocked — waiting on a dependency or a crashed agent.

Use hordr fleet reset <epic> to re-queue a lane, and hordr fleet abort to tear a fleet down (beans are always kept for retry).

Beans & planning → · Commands →