orrerix subagents
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What it is
Agent CLIs run helpers of their own. Claude Code delegates to subagents, Copilot runs custom agents in a separate context window — and you never see any of it. The work happens inside one process, in a context you cannot read, steer or interrupt, and when it goes wrong your only signal is the summary that comes back.
orrerix subagents is a checkbox on the launcher’s Agent kind. Tick it and the pane you are launching becomes a lead: it gets a small orchestration group of its own, and its helpers open as ordinary orrerix panes — each in its own git worktree, each with a terminal you can read, steer, and kill.
The pane you type into is still yours. Nothing drives it, nothing reaps it, and it never gets a task brief: you are the loop. What changes is where its helpers go.
Turning it on
In the pane setup form, pick Agent, pick your CLI, and tick orrerix subagents. Four guardrail numbers appear beside it — the same ones an orchestrator launch has always had, because they now govern the same thing:
| Guardrail | What it does to a lead’s helpers |
|---|---|
| Max live agents | how many helpers can be alive at once; the lead is refused a spawn past it |
| Idle-kill (min) | a helper with nothing to do for this long is reaped. 0 = off |
| Max spawns/hour | a backstop against a loop that keeps opening panes. 0 = unlimited |
| Watchdog stall (min) | a helper that goes silent mid-task is nudged once. 0 = off |
None of them apply to the lead pane itself. A human pane is silent when the human is.
A lead launch opens one pane: the Panes fan-out field is disabled at 1 while the toggle is on, because each lead mints an orchestration group and a tab runs one project. Two leads means two tabs.
The toggle is off by default and stays where you left it.
Where it is not offered
The checkbox is hidden for anything that cannot be a lead: another pane kind, a custom command line (that line is yours — orrerix will not append flags to it), and a CLI whose lead launch orrerix has no flags for. Today it is offered for claude, copilot and pi.
It is shown but disabled, with the reason on the control, when the tab you are launching into already runs an orchestration group. One tab owns one group, and a lead mints one — so open a new tab (Ctrl+Shift+T) and launch it there.
What your CLI is told
A lead is told to use orrerix’s own tools instead of its harness’s, and how it is told differs per CLI. Where the CLI documents a way to switch its own subagents off, orrerix uses it; where it does not, the instruction is the only lever there is.
| CLI | Its own subagents | What orrerix does |
|---|---|---|
| claude | the Agent tool | denies that tool on the command line, so delegation is not available at all |
| copilot | custom agents in a separate context | instruction only — Copilot documents no tool name to deny, so a determined model can still use its own |
| pi | none — it ships without sub-agents | nothing to disable |
| opencode, gemini | yes | not offered: their MCP config arrives through a file or the environment, which the launcher’s spawn seam does not set |
| codex | behind a config flag | not offered yet — its orrerix identity is a profile file the lead launch does not write |
The instruction itself is a short briefing typed into the pane when it opens. If you type your first message in the same instant the pane boots, the briefing can land after it — scroll up, it is there.
Reading the fleet
The lead pane wears a LEAD badge in its group’s colour, and its helpers wear the same colour, so a family reads as one at a glance.
In the Agents tab, a helper is shown indented under its lead, with a ↳. The nesting is exact: a pane is shown under a lead only when it is in that lead’s group and in the same tab, so two leads in two tabs never claim each other’s helpers.
Closing a lead
Closing a lead pane ends its whole group: every helper’s agent is killed and its pane closes with the lead. The one exception is a helper pane holding unsaved edits in its own file editor — its agent is ended like every other, but the pane stays open so the edits are not thrown away, and a toast says how many stayed.
Because ending a group is not what closing a pane means anywhere else, the ✕ asks first: the first click arms it (the button turns red and says how many helpers it is about to end), and a second click within four seconds does it. The arming lapses on its own after four seconds; clicking elsewhere does not cancel it, so if you change your mind, simply wait.
The helpers’ worktrees are left on disk. Ending the group kills the agents, not the work: the branches and their changes are still there in the Git view and in git worktree list.
What does not come back
Two things about a restart are worth knowing before you rely on them.
A lead pane comes back; its helpers do not. A lead group cannot be resumed — its helpers’ sessions and worktrees have moved on — so on restart the lead pane reopens on its own command line with a fresh, empty group. It has no memory of the helpers it had. They are not reopened, and their worktrees are still on disk for you to pick up by hand.
A restored lead uses the default guardrails, not the numbers you set when you launched it. What is written to disk is that the pane was a lead, not how it was configured. If you set an unusual cap, set it again after a restart.
What a lead can and cannot do
A lead holds the fleet tools an orchestrator holds — open a helper, prompt it, read its output, kill it, focus it, list them — and none of the project-running surface. It has no task board, no review gate, no merge queue, and it is nobody’s delegate: it never reports to anyone, because you are sitting in front of it.
Its helpers are workers. Asking for a reviewer or a planner is refused, with the reason: a lead group has no review gate and no board.
When a helper reports done or blocked, that report is typed into your pane — the same delivery an orchestrator gets. A progress report has nowhere to go in a group with no board, so it is recorded and types nothing.
See also
- Agents tab — where the nesting is rendered.
- The manager pane — the other pane you talk to, and the opposite pole: a manager holds no fleet tools at all.