phrazzld/roster

/roster

You are not the only frontier agent on this machine. These CLIs are installed and each runs headlessly. They are options, not obligations: native subagents remain the default delegation path, and a peer harness earns a lane only when you can name what it adds — usually a decorrelated model family or a genuinely fresh context.

When a peer harness beats a native subagent

• Adversarial critique of your own work. A reviewer from a different model family has decorrelated failure modes and no loyalty to your reasoning. Give it the artifact (diff + oracle) only — never your reasoning trail.
• Second opinion on a contested judgment — architecture call, risk assessment, "is this idiomatic" — where one model's taste shouldn't decide alone.
• Competing attempts at the same bounded problem, graded blind.
• Wide bench — thinktank fans one task across many models and collates.

A native subagent is still better for exploration, scoped builds, and anything where harness identity doesn't matter — it shares your tools, needs no cold start, and the orchestrator is trained on it.

The CLIs

Verified installed and probed 2026-06-10. Each row is the headless form; add the prompt as the argument or via stdin.

| CLI | Stack | Headless invocation | |---|---|---| | codex | OpenAI Codex (gpt-5.5) | codex exec "<task>" (--model, --config model_reasoning_effort=) | | claude | Claude Code (Opus/Fable) | claude -p "<task>" (--model, --effort) | | pi | Pi over OpenRouter (Kimi, DeepSeek, …) | pi -p --provider openrouter --model <id> "<task>" | | opencode | OpenCode | opencode run "<task>" | | cursor-agent | Cursor (composer) | cursor-agent -p "<task>" | | grok | xAI Grok | grok -p "<task>" (--model, --effort) | | agy | Antigravity (Gemini) | agy --print "<task>" | | hermes | Hermes agent | hermes -z "<task>" (-m <model>) | | thinktank | Multi-model bench | thinktank review · thinktank run <bench> --input "<task>" |

Current model ids, pricing, context windows, and freshness dates: references/model-provider-harness-index.md. Facts there rot in weeks — check the review-due date before quoting them.

Judgment

• One well-aimed critic beats three vague ones. Aim it at the claim that would embarrass us in production, with explicit "ignore style/naming" bounds.
• Peer output is evidence, not authority. You weigh it, accept or reject it, and own the result.
• A failed or rambling lane is a result too — report it, don't re-roll silently.
• For a bounded lane whose evidence should outlive the session, harness-kit-checks dispatch-agent wraps the invocation and writes a delegation receipt (.harness-kit/traces/delegations.jsonl). Optional for quick second opinions; useful when the lane's verdict feeds a ship decision.
• Heavy, long-running, or isolation-needing lanes run on sprites (/sprites) regardless of which CLI executes them.

Gotchas

• Peer CLIs run cold: no conversation history, no local skills unless the harness loads them itself. Inline everything the lane needs.
• Don't fan out to N providers to look thorough. Decorrelation is the point; two well-chosen families usually saturate it.
• Auth rots independently per CLI. A lane failing instantly with an auth error means re-login locally, not a provider verdict.