agy-staff

Google’s own coding agent is the Antigravity CLI, and this project hires it: a companion script wraps agy and hands it to Claude Code, Codex or Pi as a colleague worth delegating to. Five personas divide the work — ask for a tool-free one-shot answer, staffer for general delegation, researcher, reviewer for code and for plans, and implementer for scoped edits — each pinned to a Gemini 3.8 Flash effort tier, with a lead skill telling the host agent what to hand over and what to keep. Only ask answers in the same call; the other four return a job id and a wait command, run in a detached worker process, and leave their spec, log, result and final status under .agy-staff/ in the repository. It appeared on 2026-08-18 and shipped twelve releases in the following month, MIT-licensed, and finished September with 696 stars and two open issues.

Who built itThe GitHub profile behind the repository puts the account at 2022-04-18 with 31 public repositories, 147 followers, a bio of “think twice”, a company field filled in as Google and a personal site at lastwhisper.dev. Its 50 of the repository’s 52 commits arrive under two author names — pkuwkl with 39 and LastWhisper with 11 — both linked to the same account. Two other people, Shen-18 and solitudealma, have one commit each.

1. 01

   One month, twelve releases, and a list that actually got done

   The repository was created on 2026-08-18 and v0.3.0, marked as the first public release, landed the same afternoon; by v0.7.3 on 2026-09-15 there were twelve releases, with a v0.3.1 tag that never became one and release notes for only eleven of them. Fifty-two commits carry the month — 40 in August, 12 in September — and the release titles read like a plan that was finished rather than a changelog: personas, implementer continuation, opaque task text, a new default model, a false-crash guard, streaming observation and recovery, recovery follow-ups with workspace attachment, task orchestration with AGY, and three releases of Windows work at the end. The oldest commit predates the repository’s creation date and is the one that started it: a single-brain agy wrapper with modes, jobs and setup. The project is JavaScript with no runtime dependency beyond Node’s standard library, MIT-licensed, and it ended September with 696 stars, 46 forks, a single watcher and two open issues — a request for a second host CLI, and a proposal for a channel where the staffer could post findings after a session ends. Forty-two commits carry a co-author trailer and 40 of those name Claude, 37 of them Fable 5 and three Fable 5.1; of the three accounts that have committed, two contributed a single commit each.

2. 02

   What actually crosses between the two agents

   No shared memory, no request-response API and no daemon: what crosses between the agents is a shell command, a file and an id. The persona skills are instructions for the host agent, which composes the call itself and runs node companion/agy-companion.mjs <mode> --prompt …. The companion parses the shell’s argv exactly once, interprets no quotes and inspects no byte of the task, so a task mentioning git diff --check reaches agy byte for byte instead of being read as a companion flag — which is why v0.4.5 deleted positional task text and accepts exactly one of --prompt, --prompt-file or --stdin. For the background modes the companion writes a job spec and spawns a detached copy of itself as _worker <job-id>, which spawns the agy child and drains its stream-json output continuously into a bounded progress snapshot. It attaches the workspace with --add-dir <repoRoot>, which used to be missing from the restricted path: before the fix, every restricted run ended as a success with an empty response. Results and workspace warnings go to stdout, while the telemetry line — mode, profile, model, duration, tokens, conversation id — goes to stderr and into the job log. Continuity between turns rides on agy’s own conversation id, recorded in the repository’s .agy-staff/state.json, which is what continue and restart reuse later.

3. 03

   Where the staffer’s authority stops

   Each persona is fixed rather than tunable: ask is synchronous and tool-free, the other four hand back a job id, and no flag changes that. Effort is pinned too — low for ask, medium for staffer and reviewer, high for researcher and implementer — so delegating means picking a colleague, not tuning a model. The boundary lives in the lead skill, and the month’s last release exists because it was not sharp enough: hosts could delegate a search while continuing local investigation, leaving users to steer the handover and the wait themselves. v0.7.3 replaced that with a general default — frame the assignment, delegate coherent substantive work, wait, assess the result, then follow up, take over or deliver — with acceptance that asks for task-appropriate artifacts and evidence, and exceptions kept for small work, useful host work during a wait and later verification. What a worker may do is governed by prompts rather than permissions: four templates default-deny irreversible or costly actions, and the same prompt opens what a task authorizes. Three git guards sit above it — implement may start in a dirty workspace with a capped summary of paths already touched, while research and review snapshot git status --porcelain before and after — and the README states the limit in one line: these prompt instructions do not provide permission isolation.

4. 04

   Failure is a state to inspect, not a retry

   Nothing in the runtime retries on its own: the companion never retries automatically. A job that runs out of time ends in a terminal state carrying recovery metadata — requires_user_confirmation, a suggested_timeout set to twice the previous timeout and capped at 120 minutes, and an exact continuation command — and the calling agent must ask the user whether to continue or stop. Hard expiry and a timeout reported by AGY are separated into reason=hard_timeout and reason=response_timeout; a known conversation turns either into attention and exit 5, and without one the job stays an error. Recovery is an explicit new job linked to the old one, and continue refuses when the job it would continue is still running — the follow-up is not queued, so the caller waits or cancels first. Intermediates follow the same instinct: after a warning-free success the raw event stream and snapshot are deleted, while failures, cancellation and hard timeouts keep them, so partial work can be inspected before anyone decides to continue. The same instinct produced a fix for a report that was never true: a job started in one sandbox context and collected from another looked crashed because the worker’s PID was not visible from where it was read, and a job misclassified that way now heals back to running when inspected from the context that started it.

5. 05

   Two weeks of Windows, and a contribution kept whole

   The repository had never been run on Windows: there was no windowsHide and no win32 branch anywhere, and continuous integration only ran on Ubuntu. A user reported that dispatching a background job made console windows appear continuously, that neither cancel nor closing the terminal stopped them, and that the machine was unusable until the node.exe tree was killed from the task manager. A contributor started the fix on the state lock, where Windows reports EPERM and EBUSY instead; the maintainer completed it, and when a follow-up pull request grew out of that work he pushed his commits onto the contributor’s branch so the original author kept it. Continuous integration was split into three jobs, with the Windows tests behind a manual approval gate because a Windows run is slow. The best bug came last: a detached worker keeps its exited dispatcher’s PID as its parent on Windows, PIDs are reused quickly, and once reused an unrelated orphan looked like a descendant and was killed — a vanished job, no status file, and a log of exactly 178 bytes that no internal error path could produce. The fix only follows a parent link when the child was created after the parent, and has the leader fall to taskkill /PID <pid> /F rather than /T. Windows support is still described as best-effort and unvalidated against a real Windows agy installation.