Stale page: the huddle is being renamed and rebuilt as the Task Manager, so this page will be rewritten. Treat what it says as out of date until then.

The huddle

The huddle is a shared, two-way todo list between you and the AI agents working in your projects. You add work, drag it into priority order, answer questions and tick what is good. The agents add items, say when they start and finish, ask you questions on an item, and hand finished work to you for review. Each item has a short thread, so the conversation about a piece of work stays with that work instead of scrolling away in a terminal.

The app shows the huddle as swarm (the tab, the plugin row and the menu link). Everything underneath, the plugin id, the routes, the MCP tools and the database file, is still called huddle, and so are these pages.

Where to find it

The left sidebar's tab strip: the swarm tab. It stays in the strip with no close key while the show tab setting is on.
The menu tab: the swarm row opens the plugin's settings page.
The tab's title row: the pop out key opens the huddle in its own window. Every press opens another window, and each window keeps its own list choice.
The swarm panel: clicking an agent opens its chat drawer, whose tasks viewer tab is the huddle list of that one agent.

Turning it on

The huddle is a plugin. A clean install starts with it on. An install that existed before the plugin shipped keeps whatever it had, which is off when nothing was stored.

Open the menu tab and choose the plugins page.
Find swarm (marked plugin) and press its switch.
The switch grants the permissions it asks for: read sessions and projects, message a session, toasts, and agent writes.

Turning it off keeps every item. While it is off there is no tab, no menu link, no huddle MCP tools, and every huddle route answers 409 cplug_disabled.

How the pieces fit

Page	What it covers
Items and states	lists, items, the statuses and the colored stripe, who may change what
The thread and replies	the chat on each item, post kinds, unread, files on a reply
Questions and answer forms	numbered questions, typed forms, inline pills, dismissing
Reviews and ticks	ready to review, the review block, ticking, notes, needs you
Groups, views and densities	groups, by status and by group, densities, the project accordion, flags
Schedules and nudges	scheduled and repeating items, run now, the idle nudge
Send to carnivore and the send queue	how a session learns the list changed
The add box inbox	how a typed line becomes filed, titled, grouped items
Artifacts	an agent's HTML page on a thread
GitHub issue links	linking an item to the issue it tracks
For agents: MCP tools and rules	every `huddle_*` tool and the rules an agent follows

Settings

All of these live on the swarm settings page (menu tab, swarm) and are one value for you on every device and window.

Setting	Default	Range	What it does
show tab	on		keeps the swarm tab in the strip; off removes it on every browser
show empty groups	off		draws groups that hold no items
hide completed	off		hides checked items in every list
view	by status	by status, by group	how the list is sorted
density	normal	compact, normal, full	how much each row shows
accordion	off		only one project open at a time in all projects
held send minutes	30	1 to 1440	how long a send waits for a busy session before it gives up and alerts you
send quiet seconds	10	1 to 300	quiet time before queued changes go out as one send
send cap seconds	45	5 to 600	the longest the first queued change waits
nudge minutes	60	15 to 1440	silence before an idle agent is nudged
nudge tries	3	1 to 10	nudges before an item is flagged to you as stuck
inbox fallback seconds	120	15 to 3600	how long an add box entry waits for a session to file it

Two switches are per project rather than global: the nudge (the bell on the project bar, or the edit project modal) and whether the add box files through a session (the edit project modal).

Examples

An agent finishes a change and marks it done. The row moves into ready to review with a short review block saying what to check. You check it, tick it, and the agent sees the tick on its next read.
You type "fix the toast color" in the add box. The project's most recent session files it with a title and a group, and starts on it.
An agent is blocked. It asks two numbered questions on the item. The row moves to needs you, the tab badge counts it, and you answer from the row.

Troubleshooting

No swarm tab. The plugin is off (plugins page) or show tab is off (swarm settings page). A new agent post never brings back a tab you switched off.
The tools are missing in an agent session. The plugin is off, so its MCP tools are absent from the tool list. Turn it on and the agent can call task_manager_guide.

For agents: MCP tools and rules
The engineering record: docs/task-manager.md
The plugin model huddle was the first example of: docs/cplugs.md

For AI: key facts

Visible name swarm; every identifier is huddle (plugin id huddle, routes under /api/v1/cplugs/huddle/, tools huddle_*, file huddle.db in <state_dir>/cplugs/huddle/).
One list per project (keyed by the project's row id), one shared list (key all, shown as shared), and the read-only aggregate "all projects" (client key aggregate). A Swarm agent's own thread is list agent:<id>.
Changes are pushed, never polled: every write names the topic cplug.huddle.list:<list> on resources.changed.
Only the owner approves, reorders and writes notes; the store refuses those from an agent.
Call task_manager_guide before the first huddle write in a session; re-read it with since_rev when an answer's guide_rev rises.

updated 2026-10-11