Agent providers

mechanics agents                                    # what is reachable
mechanics gaps --app=<slug> --agent=claude          # a harness edits the tree itself
mechanics gaps --app=<slug> --agent=ollama --model=qwen2.5-coder:7b
mechanics gaps --app=<slug> --agent=?               # pick from what responded

run dispatch used to hardcode claude. That was fine while there was one harness worth pointing at and wrong the moment there were several: a repo on a locked-down network, a team standardised on a different CLI, and a machine with a local model and no API budget all want the same pipeline.

Two provider shapes

Harness providers — claude, codex, qwen

Already agents. They have their own tools, their own file access, their own loop. Handing one a brief in a worktree is the whole integration; it edits the tree itself.

Model providers — ollama, lmstudio, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint

Text in, text out. They cannot open a file. Giving them the same autonomy means giving them a way to say what to change and having mechanics make the change, so they answer in a small edit protocol which is validated, applied, and rolled back as one unit if the result does not build.

The protocol is exact-substring rather than a diff on purpose: a patch needs the model to count context lines, and a hunk that lands at the wrong offset still parses.

What every provider may do

Write behaviours, write specs, restructure app code — full reach over the tree.

What no provider may do

Four moves are refused whatever the provider’s kind:

1. Editing a wave file
2. Promoting a draft behaviour to active
3. Touching coverage.ignore
4. Flipping coverage.enforce

Those are not work. They are claims that the work is good. An agent that edits a thousand files is doing work; an agent that marks its own work green is doing something else, and providers here are given the first without the second, deliberately.

The same line runs through the docket protocol: an agent may raise or reject a proposal, but mechanics run accept refuses any actor that is not human.

The honest limit

The actor check infers human from the absence of an agent session variable, so a process that unsets it is indistinguishable from a person. It removes the default path and nothing more. The durable boundary is that proposals and their resolutions are committed files somebody reviews.