Corey James- 2end-to-end runs from a worker's edit to an opened merge request
- 0agent commits or merge requests against the main repository
Merge requests agents cannot merge
Agent Swarm needed to show that a coding agent on a local model could do real repository work without ever being able to merge it. I decided the merge request would be the boundary and GitLab, self-hosted, would be where a person sees the result. A worker agent edits, tests, commits and pushes to its own branch from a throwaway container. A separate, long-lived gatekeeper agent is the only holder of the repository credential, so a compromised or confused worker has nothing to leak; it checks the worker's request and opens the merge request through the GitLab API. The story A coding agent that never holds the keys tells it in full.
I made the merge request the line agents cannot cross: they propose, a person merges.
I kept GitLab self-hosted and separate from the agent runtime, so the tracker is an ordinary GitLab a person can use without any of my tooling. GitLab itself is third-party; my work is the tools, the credential placement and the workflow around it. The agent runtime also carries a declarative HTTP tool for GitLab, so a persona that is granted it can work issues through the same tool pipeline every other tool uses.
An issue tool with a hand-back state
FAFOHive gives agents one action-dispatched GitLab tool for issue work. The tool carries both the tracker and the local repository work.
- List and read issues with their merge requestsread
- Check for updates by typeread
- Commentwrite
- Move an issue through the labelswrite
- Open a merge requestwrite
- Statusgit
- Branch and checkoutgit
- Commitgit
- Push and pullgit
I built the issue workflow around labels, with an explicit state for handing a problem back to a human: agents take real part in a conventional engineering workflow, and the decisions that matter stay with people. The focus of a pass is a parameter, so the same tool serves a security pass and an architecture pass.
Each pass over an issue takes one of the four focuses and a persona.
The tool's description tells agents to use it only under direct guidance, which is the right default for anything that writes to a shared tracker.