Agent-first human orchestration

A control plane for the human bottleneck.

Humans are scarce reviewers with tiny context windows and slow response times. humanctl gives agents a better way to show work, ask the smallest useful question, collect answers outside the chat thread, and resume without losing state.

.humanctl/local-firstopen source

See the modes Inspect the model

Let's be real: humans are the bottleneck. humanctl helps them not be.

Escalation level

nudge

A lightweight interruption when a quick glance is probably enough. Better than silent idling, cheaper than a full context reload.

Opens a preview, note, or comparison without derailing the rest of the run
Keeps files, context, and artifacts attached to the same object
Still lands in the event queue if the active session misses the live steer

What it replacesthread archaeology and idle waiting

What it keepsstate, files, answers, and context

What it optimizesthe human handoff, not the agent

Agents move fast. Humans context-switch slowly.

The problem is not intelligence. The problem is the handoff surface. Chat is linear, lossy, and thread-local.

The answer is not another generic dashboard.

humanctl is a local-first coordination layer where agents decide what to show, what to ask, and how strongly to escalate.

Files back the state. Events carry the steer.

Live updates are a convenience. Durable storage is the truth. That is what makes future sessions coherent.

The job

Package blockers into the smallest possible unit of human attention.

`humanctl` is not another generic agent dashboard. It is an async escalation layer where agents can surface context, attach artifacts, ask one focused question, and pick up again later from the exact same state.

The shared store is the source of truth. Live steer delivery is a convenience on top of the persisted queue, not a fragile dependency on whether a thread stayed alive.

Show

Put anything on the surface

HTML previews, markdown docs, screenshots, diffs, forms, file views, and any renderable artifact an agent wants a human to inspect.

Ask

Ask better questions

Turn a fuzzy blocker into a compact decision packet with attachments, context, and a clear response shape.

Resume

Resume without archaeology

The shared store is the truth. New sessions read durable files and events instead of reconstructing lost context from chat.

Local-first model

One workspace. Durable files. An append-only queue.

.humanctl/
  manifest.json
  inbox/
    events.jsonl
  tabs/
    main/
      manifest.json
      things/
  artifacts/
  state/
    ui.json

Things are the atomic objects agents create or update.

Events are the steer queue: created, updated, answered,approved, closed.

Tabs are navigation and focus, not a hard schema for content.

Open source infrastructure for human-in-the-loop agents

Your human is busy. Keep them useful.

Start with a local workspace, a tiny CLI, and a better escalation surface than chat alone.