Swarm status

Skill jmylchreest/aide/skills/swarm-status

Inspect a running swarm — show the agent tree, current tools, halts/pauses, and recent task/message activity for the orchestrator's own swarm.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add jmylchreest/aide --skill swarm-status

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One thing to look at

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SKILL.md

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Swarm Status

Quick orchestrator-side inspection of a live swarm. Run this when you want to see what your spawned subagents are doing right now without halting them or opening the aide-web dashboard.

Steps

1. Resolve current session (your own)

./.aide/bin/aide reflect current-session

Use that ID as <parent> below — it's the orchestrator session that owns the swarm.

2. List agents in this swarm

./.aide/bin/aide agent list --parent=<parent> --json

Returns one record per registered subagent with parent_session, namespace, status, halt, paused, deadline.

3. Active tasks for this swarm

./.aide/bin/aide task list --parent-session=<parent> --json

Filters the project-wide task bucket to ones tagged with this swarm's parent. Look for tasks stuck in claimed without progress.

4. Recent messages

./.aide/bin/aide message list --parent-session=<parent>

Cross-agent comms within this swarm. High-priority messages from the orchestrator are surfaced to subagents on their next tool call by the signals hook.

5. Summarise for the user

Group by agent. For each, report:

Status (running / paused / halted)
Current tool (read agent:<id>:currentTool via aide state get currentTool --agent=<id> if you want this)
Any flags (halt with reason, pause)
Open tasks they hold
Deadline if set

Example output:

Swarm <parent-id-short> — 3 agents

agent-auth (running):
  current: Edit src/auth/handler.ts
  tasks: 2 in_progress
  no flags

agent-payments (paused):
  reason: scope drift — investigating
  tasks: 1 claimed (#42)
  paused 3m ago

agent-docs (halted):
  reason: repeated rustdoc — see new instinct
  halted 12m ago

When to use halts vs. messages

Halt if the agent is clearly off-track or burning budget with no progress. The halt blocks tool calls; the model will respond once with the halt reason then stop.
High-priority message if you want to redirect without stopping — arrives as additionalContext on the next tool call so the model can read it and adjust.

Both are sent via aide CLI:

./.aide/bin/aide agent halt <agent-id> --reason="..."
./.aide/bin/aide message send --from=orchestrator --to=<agent-id> \
  --priority=high "redirect: focus on auth.ts only"

Not for

This skill is read-only orchestration. Use the swarm skill itself to launch new agents or resolve worktrees at the end.