What happens to a crew station when Claude Code stops an idle session while I am away?

Tares brings the station back. Claude Code stops an idle session after about an hour, and the watch that tares factory crew up starts in the background revives any station that stops, under the same name. The revived session reads its notes and the project on Tares, so it carries on from where the last one stopped. The watch writes its log to ~/factory/watch.log.

How it works

The software factory for Claude Code is a crew of Claude Code sessions that run in the background on your machine. Tares plans for the idle stop in three ways:

• The watch. tares factory crew up starts the crew and a watch. The watch brings back any station that stops, under the same name. Its log is ~/factory/watch.log, so you can check when a station was revived.
• The schedule. The orchestrator wakes every 20 minutes and checks for work. An idle crew still notices a new project, a stalled ticket or a merged pull request that unblocks the next one.
• The record. A revived session reads its notes and the project on Tares. Tares keeps the plan, the tickets, the reviews and your answers, so the new session does not start from nothing.

The crew keeps asking you before the decisions that are yours. Questions wait on the desk until you answer them. When the plan does not answer a smaller question, the crew records an assumption and carries on, and the orchestrator confirms the assumptions with you once per milestone.

A revival does not change who does what. The orchestrator hands out work and starts builders, a builder takes its tickets and opens pull requests, and the reviewer reviews every pull request to a fixed bar. Merging stays your setting. At L4-ship, a builder merges once the reviewer approves and CI is green. At L3-review, every merge waits for your yes. Releasing is off unless you ask for it.

The full picture is on Run autonomous, self-running Claude Code sessions.

Set it up

You do not configure revival. It starts with the crew. To set up a crew in the usual order, follow these steps. The full Local and Tares Cloud setup is on Build a software factory with Claude Code.

1. Check that Claude Code is signed in, that gh is signed in with write access to the repos the crew works in, and that git, jq and curl are installed.

gh auth login

2. Install the CLI.

uv tool install tares     # or: brew install glassflow/tap/tares

3. Connect to Tares. On Tares Cloud, sign in and pick your workspace in the browser. On a local Tares, start Tares, then start the MCP endpoint every crew session shares in a second terminal.

tares login

tares up
tares mcp --transport streamable-http

4. Give Tares access to GitHub. On a local Tares this is in Settings > GitHub. On Tares Cloud it is Connect GitHub.
5. Bring up the crew. This also starts the watch that revives stopped stations.

tares factory crew up

6. Plan a project.

tares factory spec "what you want to build"

7. When you come back, read the watch log to see what was revived.

cat ~/factory/watch.log

To answer a question that waited on the desk, attach to the orchestrator.

tares factory crew attach orchestrator

What you get

• Work that continues while you are away. A station that Claude Code stops for being idle comes back under the same name, without you restarting it.
• Continuity. A revived session reads its notes and the project on Tares and carries on from where the last one stopped. The plan, tickets, reviews and your answers stay on Tares.
• A check for new work. The orchestrator checks every 20 minutes, so an idle crew still picks up a new project, a stalled ticket or a merged pull request that unblocks the next one.
• A log you can read. ~/factory/watch.log records what the watch did.
• Decisions that stay yours. Questions wait on the desk, merging follows your L4-ship or L3-review setting, and releasing is off unless you ask for it.

When something else fits

• If you want every station to stop, run tares factory crew down. Tares keeps the projects, tickets and answers, and tares factory crew up starts fresh sessions that carry on from them.
• If a question is waiting for you, attach to the orchestrator with tares factory crew attach orchestrator. The watch brings sessions back, but it does not answer decisions that are yours.

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