Overview
What Captain Barbossa is: one native agent CLI as captain, more as crew, all inside a Herdr workspace on one checkout.
Captain Barbossa turns one native agent CLI into a captain and lets it recruit more of them as crew, each in its own Herdr pane, all working the same checkout.
There is no daemon, no custom UI, and no tmux layer. Everything runs through Herdr panes plus a small graph memory stored outside the repository and a curated scope committed with it. The agents keep their own input, history, permissions, and login, because Captain Barbossa never wraps them: it launches them and talks to their panes.
The model#
One captain, many crew, one checkout. The captain is the only thing you talk to. It recruits crew, hands each one an assignment with declared file ownership, waits for reports, and retires crew when their work is done.
| Role | Where it runs | What it can do |
|---|---|---|
| Captain | The pane you launched it in | Recruits, assigns, waits, answers, interrupts, dismisses. Runs deterministic commands itself. Reads every memory scope. |
| Crew | A pane or tab the captain opened | Works one assignment, inside its own declared paths. Repo memory only. |
| You | The captain's pane | Ask in plain language, or run any captain command from a second shell. |
Captain-only commands are refused for crew, and crew forward delegation requests back to the captain instead of spawning their own. A crew never recruits.
What a session is worth#
A pane plus a model is the most expensive thing a captain can spend. Captain Barbossa is built around that: the default model tier is cheap, placement is declared rather than negotiated, and a dashboard shows live context against cumulative spend so you can see what the team is costing.
It is also why not every task becomes a crew. A captain delegates judgement, but work whose outcome its inputs already fix — a commit, a push, a declared build target — runs through captain do with no pane and no model at all, and read-only questions through captain inspect. That distinction is the first thing a captain decides: see when to recruit.
captain --agent codex
# "Recruit crew to review the current changes."
# "Wait for Jack."Where to go next#
- Install — requirements,
uv tool install, and upgrading. - Quickstart — a captain, one crew, and one report.
- Crew and assignments — how work is handed over and proven finished.
- CLI reference — every command on one page.