Sessions

A session is one agent conversation: you ask, the agent works, and a question may wait on you. Collie shows each session on your phone in a pane. Chat reads the session from the agent's own record, so you can read it and answer it from your phone. The terminal view is one more way to look at the same pane.

tmux and zellij call their own top-level group a session. Collie shows it as a space. This page uses "session" only for the conversation.

Where sessions come from

Sessions come from two places:

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  A terminal. Herdr, the Herdr core, tmux, zellij, tuios or Tern holds your shells, and an agent runs in one of them. Collie reads the panes from it and finds the agent's session. This is how most people use Collie. Terminals says how to point Collie at yours.
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  A durable agent. One that you wrote or run has no screen, and each of its conversations is a session with Chat and nothing else. This is experimental. Durable agents has the steps.

What the phone shows

Your phone has one URL. Under it, each terminal workspace is a space, and each durable agent is a space with its own name. A space holds tabs, and a tab holds panes. A pane shows one session. A durable agent appears in its own Durable agents section, with its name, its runtime and an Experimental badge, the count of its open conversations, and how many of them wait on you. The section moves above your spaces when a question waits.

A terminal space draws exactly what it always drew. A durable agent space opens on its list of conversations, and a control appears only when that durable agent says it can do it.

The words are in Terminology.

One machine, or several

One Collie carries a terminal and durable agents together. A machine with Herdr and a durable agent needs no second Collie and no crew. Both appear under the same URL.

Several machines need a crew. A crew puts every machine's Collie behind one lead and one URL (Crews). A machine in the crew can carry its own terminal and its own durable agents.

List the sessions from a terminal

collie sessions prints every agent session the running Collie sees, one row each. It reads this Collie's own snapshot and changes nothing.

$ collie sessions
MEMBER   MUX         SEAT         HARNESS                 STATE    SESSION  ACTIVE
bluefin  herdr       collie (t1)  claude claude-opus-5-5  blocked  yes      3m
bluefin  herdr       docs (t2)    codex gpt-9             working  yes      2h
bluefin  durable     -            desk                    working  yes      1m
lab      herdr-core  api (p9)     claude                  idle     yes      12m

4 sessions: 1 blocked, 2 working, 1 idle

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  MEMBER is the machine in the crew, by its name, or by its id when it has no name. Rows are sorted by member, then workspace.
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  MUX is the terminal program that holds the pane. A durable agent shows its own program. Every other row shows the program the lead reads from that machine. It shows - where Collie has no name for it, for example for a member on an older build.
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  SEAT is the workspace and the pane. A durable agent has no pane, so it shows -.
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  HARNESS is the agent program, with its model when Collie knows it. A durable agent shows its own name.
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  STATE is what the agent is doing: working, blocked, idle, done or unknown.
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  SESSION says yes when Collie knows the agent's session, so Chat can read it, and no when it does not.
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  ACTIVE is the time since you last opened or drove the pane from Collie.

Run it on the lead to see the whole crew. On a member it lists that member's own panes, and the last line says so.

With no Collie running the command prints one line and exits 1. If Collie refuses the read, it prints the same advice as collie doctor and exits 1.