What waits on my desk while the crew works on dependency upgrades?

Tares keeps the questions the crew cannot answer itself on your desk, and tares factory crew desk shows each one in full. You answer them in the orchestrator’s session, one at a time, each with a recommendation. The same desk serves every project you hand the crew, including a dependency upgrades project.

How it works

The software factory for Claude Code is a crew of Claude Code sessions: an orchestrator, a reviewer and builders. The orchestrator is the only session you talk to. It hands out work, answers the other sessions, and brings you what needs you.

The desk is that list of questions. Tares holds it as part of the crew’s record, together with the plan, the tickets, every review, the assumptions the crew made, and your answers in your own words.

• Questions reach you one at a time. Each arrives in the orchestrator’s session with a recommendation, so you can accept it or say something else.
• Other projects carry on. While one project waits for you, the crew keeps working on the rest.
• Merges can wait for you too. If you chose it in the crew settings, a project waits for your yes before every merge. Otherwise the crew merges on its own after review and green CI.
• Choices the crew made alone are written down. You can check them at the end of each milestone instead of during every step.
• The record outlives the sessions. Sessions come and go, and a crew that restarts carries on where it stopped, with your open questions still on the desk.

For the full picture of the crew and how it starts, see Get started.

Set it up

1. Check that Claude Code is signed in, gh is signed in with write access to the repos the crew works in, and git, jq and curl are installed.
2. Install the CLI and start Tares. On a local Tares, run tares up, then start the MCP endpoint in a second terminal with tares mcp --transport streamable-http. On Tares Cloud, run tares login and pick your workspace in the browser instead.
3. Give Tares access to GitHub: Settings > GitHub for a local Tares, or Connect GitHub on Tares Cloud.
4. Bring up the crew, then plan the project. The planning session ends by asking whether to hand the project to the crew. Say yes and the orchestrator picks it up.

tares factory crew up
tares factory spec "what you want to build"

5. Read what is waiting for you. The desk lists every open question in full:

tares factory crew desk

6. Open the orchestrator in your terminal and answer, one question at a time:

tares factory crew attach orchestrator

7. For a quick overview, run tares factory crew status. It shows the stations, the questions for you, and a line per project. tares factory projects lists every project handed to the crew with its progress, builders and repos.

The Crew page of the Tares console shows the same thing in the browser, at http://127.0.0.1:8787/crew on a local Tares. The question waiting for you sits at the top, followed by the stations, each open project with its builders, and the pull requests waiting for review.

What you get

• One place to look. tares factory crew desk gives you every question waiting for you, each in full, so you know what the crew needs before you open a session.
• One place to answer. Every project’s questions arrive in the orchestrator’s session, one at a time, each with a recommendation.
• Your time goes to the plan and to the few decisions that are really yours, not to watching terminals.
• Your answers stay on Tares in your own words, so the crew can rely on them later and a restart loses nothing.
• A written record of what the crew decided on its own, ready to check at the end of each milestone.
• Projects that do not need you keep moving while another waits on your answer.

When something else fits

• If you want to work on a project yourself instead of answering a crew, run tares factory session to build it in your own Claude Code session. It takes a project over from the crew only when you say yes.
• If you need everything to stop, tares factory crew halt "<reason>" stops merges, pushes and new sessions until crew resume, and tares factory finish marks a project done yourself.

Related