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Overview

The Manager is a per-repository system that monitors, coordinates, and directs all your agents. It acts like a team lead — tracking progress, managing goals, and stepping in when agents need help. Commander uses a recursive manager hierarchy: each repository has a root manager, and you can create project sub-managers to scope work into named groups.

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Enabling

  1. Open Settings (Cmd+Shift+P)
  2. Select your repository
  3. Toggle Manager Enabled
  4. Optionally configure sampling interval and custom instructions

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What It Monitors

The manager automatically tracks events across all workspaces:
  • Agent completions, errors, and rate limits
  • Agents asking questions or waiting for input
  • New workspaces created
  • Pull requests opened, merged, or failing CI
  • Linear issue status changes and new comments
  • Goal progress

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Goals

The manager organizes work through hierarchical goals:
  • Create goals with a title, description, and rich content
  • Link goals to workspaces, agents, Linear issues, or PRs
  • Track status from pending through completed
  • Nest sub-goals under parent goals
  • Attach images with captions

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Project Managers

For larger efforts, create project sub-managers:
  • Each project manager owns a subset of workspaces
  • Scopes goals and events to that project
  • Reports up to the root manager
  • Create via the manager chat or the workspace context menu
  • Delete a project manager when it’s no longer needed (with option to archive its workspaces)
  • Reparent a project manager to move it under a different parent manager

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Suggested Actions

After every response, the manager can suggest 1-5 actions as clickable buttons in the UI. These might include:
  • “Create workspace for ENG-456”
  • “Resume paused agents”
  • “Review PR #123”
  • “Start next priority issue”
Click a button to execute the action immediately.

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What It Can Do

The manager can take action on your behalf:
  • Create new workspaces for tasks it identifies
  • Start, pause, resume, or stop agents
  • Send messages and instructions to agents
  • Update goal status and details
  • Send Slack messages to your team
  • Reassign workspaces between project managers
  • Reparent managers to reorganize the hierarchy
  • Delete project managers (with option to archive workspaces)
  • Read Linear issues and pull request details

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Awareness System

A persistent memory layer that gives managers continuous context about workspace state:
  • Enabled by default per-repository in Settings → Awareness
  • Configure the decision model (default: Haiku 4.5) — a fast model that decides when to update awareness
  • Configure the writer model (default: Sonnet 4.6) — synthesizes awareness context text
  • The system evaluates agent state and can trigger manager actions proactively
  • Force evaluate — Manually trigger an awareness evaluation from the manager view
  • Clear awareness — Reset the awareness state to start fresh

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Chatting with the Manager

Open the Manager view with Cmd+2 to chat directly. Ask about progress, request workspace creation, or give high-level instructions. You can also configure persistent instructions in repository settings (e.g., “Prioritize bug fixes over new features”, “Always run tests before creating PRs”).

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Reflection

The manager periodically reviews recent events and reflects on progress, updating goals accordingly. The interval is configurable in repository settings (default: 30 seconds).