What waits on my desk while the crew works on test coverage?

Tares puts the crew’s open questions on your desk, a list you read with tares factory crew desk while the crew works on test coverage. You answer them in the orchestrator’s session, one at a time, and each question comes with a recommendation. Everything else the crew decides itself and writes down, so you can check it later.

How it works

The desk is the list of questions waiting for you. It works the same way for a test coverage project as for any other project the crew has.

• The orchestrator is your only contact. It hands out work, answers the other stations and brings you what needs you. Builders and the reviewer do not come to you directly.
• Questions arrive one at a time. Each one carries a recommendation, so you can accept it or say something different.
• Tares keeps the record. It holds the plan, the tickets and their stages, every review, the assumptions the crew made, the questions it asked and your answers in your own words. If a session stops and the crew restarts, it carries on from that record.
• Other work continues. The crew serves every project you hand it at the same time. While your test coverage project waits for an answer, the other projects carry on.
• Merges. By default the crew merges on its own after review and green CI. A single project can instead wait for your yes before every merge.

The crew’s choices that did not need you are written down as assumptions. You check them at the end of each milestone instead of during every step.

Set it up

These steps assume the crew is installed and tares up and tares mcp are running, as described in Get started.

1. Bring up the crew if it is not running yet:

   tares factory crew up

2. Plan the test coverage work in the repo it builds on, or in a folder that holds its repos. The interview writes the spec, milestones with acceptance checks and tickets into a Tares project. Say yes when it asks whether to hand the project to the crew.

   tares factory spec "what you want to build"

3. Read what is waiting for you. The desk shows each question in full:

   tares factory crew desk

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

   tares factory crew attach orchestrator

5. For a quick overview, run the status command. It lists the stations, the questions for you and one line per project:

   tares factory crew status

6. Follow progress on the Crew page of the Tares console, 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. The desk lists every question that needs you, across all projects, so you do not watch terminals.
• A recommendation with each question, which makes most answers quick.
• Your answers kept in your own words on Tares, so the crew reuses them and a restart loses nothing.
• A written list of the assumptions the crew made on its own, which you review at the end of each milestone.
• Pull requests that are reviewed to a fixed bar and merged on main once the reviewer passes them and CI is green.
• Your time spent on the plan and on the few decisions that are really yours.

When something else fits

• If you only want a project overview, tares factory crew status shows the stations, the questions for you and a line per project without opening the full desk.
• If the test coverage work is small, tares factory session lets you do it in your own Claude Code session, still recorded on the Tares project, with no crew questions at all.
• If you need everything to stop, tares factory crew halt stops merges, pushes and new sessions until you run tares factory crew resume.

Related