mu

A small, opinionated control plane for a crew of AI coding agents working in parallel. Tmux panes, a typed task DAG, isolated VCS workspaces per agent, an audit log — and a dashboard for seeing what the crew is doing right now.

mu (no args) — read-only dashboard: agents, tracks, ready / in-progress / blocked tasks, log tail, workspaces, doctor.

The core loop is: plan work as a DAG, spawn a small crew, and watch handoffs happen in tmux:

mu workstream init auth-refactor
mu task add --title "Design auth" --impact 80 --effort-days 2
mu task add --title "Build auth"  --impact 80 --effort-days 5 --blocked-by design_auth

mu agent spawn worker-1 --workspace
mu agent send worker-1 'Pick up the next ready task and design the auth module.'
mu                         # dashboard

Need one quick helper without the DAG? mu agent spawn scout-1 -w scratch gives you a low-ceremony agent you can still send/read/wait on.

Nothing here is a black box. Agents are tmux panes you can tmux attach to, tasks live in a SQLite DAG, and workspaces are real jj workspaces / sl shares / git worktrees on disk. mu persists state and coordinates handoffs; the model still decides what to do.

For the full copy-paste flow, see Quick start.

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What mu is

• Parallelism that doesn't trip over itself. Per-agent VCS workspaces plus a real task DAG with deterministic parallel-track detection keep agents off each other's toes.
• A durable coordination layer. One SQLite registry records agents, tasks, ownership, notes, events, snapshots, and workspaces; panes can die and humans can come back later.
• Stay out of the model's way. Mu coordinates handoffs; it does not choose models, providers, or thinking effort. --cli <key> uppercases to $MU_<KEY>_COMMAND, so your shell rc owns the agent command.
• Scriptable without scraping text. Every read path that matters has --json, and every state change goes through a typed CLI verb; the dashboard is for humans, not the API.
• A low-ceremony escape hatch. The reserved scratch workstream is there when you want one driveable helper without committing to a full task graph.

What mu is NOT

• Not a build tool. mu doesn't compile, test, or deploy anything.
• Not a chat protocol. Agents communicate via the work graph and the activity log, never agent-to-agent messaging.
• Not a verifier. task close --evidence "tests pass" records the claim; mu doesn't run the tests.
• Not a replacement for pi-subagents. Mu agents are driveable tmux panes; pi-subagents is for one-shot focused delegation. See vs pi-subagents.
• Not a hosted service. Local-first SQLite.
• DB-undoable, not tmux-undoable. Every destructive verb auto-captures a whole-DB snapshot first; mu undo --yes restores the DB. Killed panes and freed workspace dirs are NOT replayed.

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When mu earns its overhead

Use mu for — multi-phase investigations; tasks worth gating with review; parallel audit or implementation/reviewer splits with isolated workspaces; anything where "what was decided and why" needs to outlive a single agent's scrollback. Use scratch for the lighter adjacent case: one helper or background watcher you still want to drive and observe.

Don't use mu for — tiny direct edits; quick local inspection; one-shot focused delegation where you only need a returned answer (use pi-subagents); single-context work where durable coordination adds ceremony.

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Install

# 1. The CLI.
npm install -g @martintrojer/mu
mu --version

# 2. The skill (teaches your coding agent how to drive mu).
npx skills add martintrojer/mu          # auto-detects pi / claude-code / codex / etc.
# Add -g to install globally (~/.<agent>/skills/), -y to skip prompts.

Requirements:

• Node 20, 22, or 23 (LTS recommended; see .nvmrc). Node 24+ is currently blocked by a better-sqlite3 native-build incompatibility.
• tmux ≥ 3.0 (mu doctor checks)
• pi (the agent CLI mu orchestrates)
• For --workspace: jj, sl, or git on PATH (or --backend none)

Update: npm install -g @martintrojer/mu@latest for the CLI; npx skills update mu for the skill.

Install from source (hacking on mu itself):

git clone https://github.com/martintrojer/mu
cd mu
npm install -g .                        # `prepare` script auto-builds; `mu` lands on $PATH
npx skills add ./skills/mu              # local-path source format

More install patterns (alias-to-dist for fastest dev iteration) in docs/USAGE_GUIDE.md § 1 Setup.

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TUI dashboard

Bare mu in a TTY launches the flagship read-only dashboard across all workstreams; mu state --tui -w <workstream> is the explicit single/multi-workstream form. Non-TTY callers and scripts keep the static/help path, and mu state --json is the API.

The dashboard has ten cards: Commits, Agents, Tracks, Ready, Activity log, Workspaces, In-progress, Blocked, Recent, and Doctor. Drill into any numbered card fullscreen with Shift+0-Shift+9; g opens the full DAG and t opens the all-tasks list. ? shows the complete keymap. Keyboard and mouse both work: navigate with keys, double-click cards or rows to drill, and scroll popup bodies with the mouse wheel.

The TUI is read-only by design. y yanks the canonical mu command for the focused row to your clipboard; you run it in a shell, so every mutation still goes through a short-lived typed CLI invocation. The one exception is user-driven: t inside a commit/show drill suspends mu's alt-screen and hands off to tuicr -r <sha>, then restores the dashboard when tuicr exits.

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Quick start

# Make sure you're inside tmux.
tmux

# Initialize the workstream (creates tmux session mu-auth-refactor)
mu workstream init auth-refactor

# Plan the work as a DAG. IDs auto-derive from titles.
mu task add --title "Design auth module" --impact 80 --effort-days 2
mu task add --title "Build auth"         --impact 80 --effort-days 5 --blocked-by design_auth_module
mu task add --title "Review auth"        --impact 60 --effort-days 1 --blocked-by build_auth

# Spawn a crew with isolated workspaces.
mu agent spawn worker-1   --workspace
mu agent spawn reviewer-1 --workspace --role read-only

# Human home base: interactive read-only TUI across every workstream
# (same dashboard is explicit with: mu state --tui -w auth-refactor).
mu

# Agent/script API: static state stays explicit and JSON-friendly.
mu state -w auth-refactor --json

# Inside an agent's pane, the agent claims and closes tasks
# without ever knowing its own name (mu reads $TMUX_PANE).
mu task claim design_auth_module
mu task note  design_auth_module "DECISION: JWT, 24h expiry, refresh via cookie"
mu task close design_auth_module --evidence "design doc reviewed by reviewer-1"

# Subscribe to events instead of polling.
mu log --tail

# Cleanup (auto-snapshots + auto-exports the conversation first).
mu workstream destroy --yes

Full tour: docs/USAGE_GUIDE.md, including the expanded dashboard/state guide.

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Portability and handoff

State lives in one SQLite DB, so it travels. mu db export <file> writes a consistent whole-DB copy plus a manifest sidecar; mu db import <file> ships it back, with per-workstream drift detection (dry-run by default; --apply commits) and a sharp --force-source that parks the loser to a sidecar before clobbering. Hard rule: don't edit the same workstream on two machines concurrently.

For humans / git / docs, mu workstream export and mu archive export render a workstream (or an archive bucket) as Markdown: per-task .md files plus an INDEX.md, suitable for committing, reviewing, or pasting. Bucket exports are read-only artifacts; the lossless un-archive path back into a live workstream is mu archive restore <label> --as <new-ws>.

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vs pi-subagents

	pi-subagents	mu
Best for	"Send this focused task to a specialist, return a result"	"Keep a driveable agent/persistent crew in tmux"
Lifetime	one-shot per task	from off-the-cuff scratch helper to long-lived crew
Substrate	pi subprocess + result files	tmux panes running pi sessions
Built-in task graph	no	yes: parallel-tracks union-find with diamond-merge
Drivable from outside pi	no (extension-only)	yes (mu is a real CLI)

The two play well together. Use pi-subagents when you want one focused answer back. Use mu's reserved scratch workstream when you want a low-ceremony helper you can keep talking to. For coordinated multi-agent work, graduate from scratch to a named workstream + task DAG. See docs/USAGE_GUIDE.md.

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Documentation

• docs/USAGE_GUIDE.md — practical tour of every verb. Start here.
• skills/mu/SKILL.md — what an LLM running inside an agent pane sees: the in-pane working loop, subscribe-vs-poll pattern.
• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — module map, reconciliation algorithm, schema seam (surrogate INTEGER PKs + the SDK boundary discipline).
• docs/VOCABULARY.md — canonical terms; source of truth for every word in code, docs, error messages.
• docs/VISION.md — the load-bearing pillars
  • the prior-runtime retrospective.
• docs/ROADMAP.md — what's next + the anti-feature pledges + explicitly-rejected ideas.
• CHANGELOG.md — release notes.

License

MIT.