How do I limit what a Claude Code crew can touch while it does small features in a monorepo?

Tares lets you limit a Claude Code crew with the repos your gh login can write to, the merge setting, a fixed review, crew halt and no releaser. You set the merge and release choices once when you bring the crew up, and you can stop everything with one command. This keeps small features inside a boundary you chose.

How it works

The software factory for Claude Code runs an orchestrator, a reviewer and builders as Claude Code sessions on your machine. Each lever below sits at a different point in that flow.

• Your gh login. Builders push and open pull requests with your gh login, so the repos it can write to are the repos the crew can change. Use a login with write access only to the monorepo the features belong in.
• Small tickets. /tares:spec writes a plan with milestones, acceptance checks and tickets. For small features, keep each ticket small. A builder takes one ticket, works on its own branch and opens a pull request.
• The merge setting. On the first crew up, you choose whether the crew merges on its own after review and green CI, or waits for your yes. A single project can also wait for your yes before every merge while the rest of the crew merges on its own.
• The reviewer bar. The reviewer reviews every pull request to a fixed bar and posts its verdict on the pull request. Nothing merges until it passes.
• A second model. You can have the Codex CLI check every commit. It is optional and set in the same first-run questions.
• Builder count. You choose how many builders run at once.
• The releaser. The releaser, which tags and deploys, exists only if you ask for one. Leave it off and tickets end at merged on main.
• Halt. tares factory crew halt stops merges, pushes and new sessions until crew resume.

The levers work on repos, merges, releases and sessions. Inside a repo you have write access to, the merge setting and the review are your controls.

Set it up

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

   gh auth login

2. Install the CLI and start Tares locally.

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

3. In a second terminal, start the MCP endpoint every crew session shares. On a local Tares the crew reaches Tares only through it.

   tares mcp --transport streamable-http

4. Give Tares its own access to the repos. On Tares Cloud, choose Connect GitHub in your workspace settings and pick only the repos you want. On a local Tares, add a token or App under Settings > GitHub. On Tares Cloud, sign in with tares login instead of running tares up and tares mcp.

5. Bring up the crew and answer the first-run questions.

   tares factory crew up

   For a conservative crew, choose to wait for your yes before merging, say no to releasing, and set a low number of builders at once. Turn on the second-model check if you want it. The answers are kept on Tares. The Get started page walks through the full quickstart.

6. Plan one small feature at a time, from the monorepo or a folder that holds its repos.

   tares factory spec "what you want to build"

   The spec ends by asking whether to hand the project to the crew. Until you say yes, the crew does not pick it up.

7. Answer questions in the orchestrator’s session, and check the setup at any point.

   tares factory crew attach orchestrator
   tares factory doctor

8. If something looks wrong, halt the crew, look at what it did, then resume.

   tares factory crew halt "checking the last merge"
   tares factory crew resume

What you get

• A crew whose reach matches your gh login, so repos you did not grant stay out of reach.
• Merges you control. With the wait-for-your-yes setting, no pull request lands without you. With self-merge, a pull request lands only after the reviewer passes it and CI is green.
• A review on every pull request, held to the same bar each time, with the verdict posted on the pull request.
• No tags and no deploys, because no releaser runs unless you asked for one.
• One command to stop merges, pushes and new sessions, and one to continue.
• A record on Tares of the plan, the tickets, every review, the assumptions the crew made and your answers. You can check the crew’s choices at the end of each milestone.
• The tares factory crew status and tares factory projects commands, plus the Crew page, show what is running and which pull requests wait for review.

When something else fits

• If you want one change built under your own eye, use tares factory session with your idea. It opens a Claude Code session bound to the project, on Tares, with no crew.
• If you want the crew to stop touching a project for good, use tares factory finish to mark it done, or tares factory crew down to stop every station. Tares keeps the projects, tickets and answers.

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