CommandCodeAI / CommandCodeAI/command-code

feat: Allow mods to spawn and await background agents / background work

Open
#691 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
No language data
Stars
4k
Forks
350
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Feature Description

Summary

Mods currently have no way to run work in the background. The agent tool (with run_in_background: true), background agents (background: true), and background shell tasks are all seams the main agent drives — none are reachable from a mod. Mods only have cmd.exec (foreground shell) and the synchronous onStop + prepareNextTurn force-continue seam for post-run model turns.

Motivation

Post-run maintenance work — summarization, extraction, knowledge discovery, compaction — is exactly the kind of task that should run detached from the main loop, on a cheap model, without blocking or polluting the session. Today a mod that wants a model to do post-run work must inject a continuation turn (onStop with {continue: true}) that runs in-line: it occupies the same run, renders in the feed, and competes with sibling mods over the single continuation slot (harness short-circuits "any mod returning continue wins").

Alternatives considered
  • Keep the onStop continuation seam and just make the injected turn quieter. Doesn't solve the collision problem (one continuation slot shared by all
    mods) or the "detached from the run" goal.
  • Background shell + cmd.events polling. Mods could shell out to cmd -p via a background process, but there's no background cmd.exec, and reacting to
    completion would require polling from a hook — no clean completion signal.

Acceptance criteria

  • A mod can launch a background agent and continue the session without blocking.
  • The spawning mod is notified (hook or event) when the agent completes, with the agent's final result.
  • The behavior is observable in the TUI Background panel (Ctrl+B) like other background work.
  • Works headless (-p), degrading deterministically.
Use Case
Mods am building or trying out that could use background running
  • Memory/journal mods that extract compressed episodes or discover durable facts from a finished run (e.g. the project-brain / task-journal pattern).

  • Any mod wanting to fan out parallel investigation or run a long background process and react when it completes.
    Current gap

  • No cmd.agent(...) / cmd.spawnAgent(...) equivalent on ModApi — a mod cannot launch the built-in agent tool or a custom agent.

  • No background variant of cmd.exec (no way to get a task id + log + wake-up like shell_command run_in_background / monitor_command).

  • No hook or event a mod can register to be notified when a background agent it spawned finishes (the result of agent_output never reaches a mod).

Proposed API (suggestion — open to design)

Something like:

  • cmd.agent({prompt, agent?, model?, runInBackground: true}) → Promise<{agentId}> — spawn a background agent from a mod.
  • A completion hook or event, e.g. cmd.hooks({onAgentResult}) or cmd.events.on('agent_completed', ...), delivering the agent's final result to the
    spawning mod.
  • Optionally: a background cmd.exec variant returning a task id + on-disk log, mirroring shell_command run_in_background.
Additional Context
  • Sort of how taste learning works to be honest
How important is this to you?

Medium. Nice mod improvements for UX, but right now these are experiments and sync running is ok.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by tracing the existing ModApi cmd.exec surface and the agent, background-agent, and background-shell seams described in the issue. Compare their behavior with the TUI Background panel (Ctrl+B) and headless (-p) mode. Done means a mod can launch work without blocking, receive its final result on completion, expose it in the background panel, and degrade deterministically headlessly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
api, backend, cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.