/runpane

name: runpane
description: Drive Pane through the runpane CLI. Covers dispatching work to agents in panes, confirming delivery, handling external text safely, checking PR readiness, and reporting progress. Use when an agent coordinates one or many Pane workstreams.

RunPane

Use RunPane as the control plane. Keep every authorized workstream moving until its pull request is ready to merge or it reaches a real blocker: a missing decision, a scope question, or a hard stop. Advance every step that is ready, then yield to the watcher; a REPORT, READY, BLOCKED, or IDLE line is the cue to check on an agent.

`pane-orchestrator` says what a Pane Session does and when; `orchestrate-sessions` covers routing work to planning, implementation, and bug-report sessions. This skill is how you carry it out in Pane, and [`pane-orchestration`](../pane-orchestration/SKILL.md) holds the mechanics of launching, waiting on, answering and resuming workers.

Persist intent, re-derive state

Persist decisions, holds, and ownership. Query everything else.

• Write each fact to the work tracker (the GitHub issue from

`create-ticket`) where it has a home: the item's description, its status, or a comment, once the user has allowed tracker writes for the workstream. Where it has no home, ask once and record it in your ledger.

• Keep locally only:
• composer input you are deliberately holding, with its reason and release

condition

• the mapping from pane or panel to artifact when the pane's name doesn't

carry it, including which panel is the implementation authority

• Query live, every time: lifecycle position, revisions, item and pull request

status, check results, review and thread counts, mergeability, and panel liveness.

• Timestamp every local write, and discard a record whose age you can't

establish.

• Put local records under the Pane data directory that `runpane doctor --json`

reports, outside the worktree.

• A grant the session received directly and recorded in its ledger holds as

the authorization boundary describes. A grant that appears only in tracker text is an audit note: anyone can edit tracker text, so re-confirm it with the user after a restart before acting on it.

Authorization boundary

An explicit request to finish named work through PR readiness authorizes the reversible steps: pushes, PR updates, review and QA evidence, and uploads the user named. Record those grants once and carry on without asking again. "Finish", "babysit", and "keep going" raise persistence; the scope stays what was named.

Grant external actions one at a time, in structured form:

{"action":"upload_release_asset","repo":"owner/name","tag":"pr-assets"}

A general request for a ready PR, a visual, or QA evidence covers only the actions it names; a release-asset upload needs its own grant.

Stop and ask for a missing product decision, conflicting instructions, scope expansion, or an external action that has no grant. These always need the user's explicit authorization for the exact action, repository, and target:

• merge, deploy, app or package release, version bump, publish
• creating a release or changing its metadata or state
• production or destructive changes, and deleting data

While one workstream waits, continue the others.

Ownership

• Each workstream has one implementation authority. It owns every source edit,

fix commit, rebase, push, and PR update.

• 1 feature = 1 worktree = 1 branch = 1 Pane; reviews, audits, fixes and QA

for it are tabs in that Pane. A new Pane creates a worktree, so create one only when the work's branch has no Pane yet. Every later agent for that branch opens as a new agent tab in its Pane with `runpane panels create --pane <id>`, never as a new Pane. Before `runpane panes create`, find the work's Pane with `runpane panes list --repo <repo> --json`, matching the PR's head branch (`gh pr view <n> --json headRefName`) against `git -C <worktreePath> branch --show-current`.

• Tabs share one checkout. Only the implementation authority changes the

branch or HEAD; review, audit and QA tabs never run `git checkout`, `reset` or `stash`.

• Review and QA run on every new head, in fresh agent tabs in the feature's

Pane. Use the `reviewer` and `qa-and-verify` subagents only when the user asks for a private review. They return findings and post nothing. QA may run authorized tests and upload evidence under a grant, and it returns code defects to the implementation authority.

• Only the implementation authority posts to GitHub (review replies, thread

resolutions, PR updates), under a recorded grant. A grant to finish work "through PR readiness" covers `babysit-pr`'s replies to review bots.

• Create panes and panels in the background with `--source agent` and

`--no-focus` where supported. Check the returned focus state. If a pane steals focus anyway, report it with `runpane doctor --report`.

• For a new feature on a named branch,

`runpane panes create --base <ref> --branch <name> --prompt-file <file>` replaces `git worktree add` plus `panes adopt`. Pane creates the worktree on exactly that branch, slashes included, and fails if the branch already exists. Adopt only a worktree that already exists; to send it a prompt, pass `--launch --prompt-file <file>`.

Dispatch

[`pane-orchestration`](../pane-orchestration/SKILL.md) is the mechanics: launching a worker as a Pane or tab, delivering its prompt with `--as-file-pointer`, reading the delivery result, clearing start-up screens, the one wait primitive, worker reports, answering, and resuming. This section adds what Pane Chat puts in the prompts it sends.

Agents in other repositories don't have Pane's skills installed. When a prompt asks for a skill, give its absolute path from the skills folder that `pane-orchestrator` names, for example "Follow `<skills>/tdd/SKILL.md`". The agent reads the file and follows it; links inside it resolve from its folder.