What will the crew ask me while it works on small features?

Tares has the crew ask you two kinds of questions: steps only you can take on your machine, and a keep-or-change question about its own choices at the end of each milestone. You answer in the orchestrator’s session, and each answer is recorded in the project’s Decisions fold in your own words. In the worked example, five questions covered a project that reached eight merged pull requests.

How it works

The software factory for Claude Code works through a project in milestones. Along the way the crew raises questions, and you answer them in the orchestrator’s session.

Steps only you can take on your machine. Some things the crew cannot do for you. In the worked example there were two:

• Trusting the repo folder in Claude Code once, so the builder could start.
• Giving Tares a GitHub token, so it could read pull request, CI and merge state.

A question at the end of each milestone. When the crew meets something the plan does not cover, it picks the sensible answer, writes it down as an assumption and carries on. At the end of the milestone, the orchestrator brings you its assumptions in one question: keep the choices the crew made on its own? In the example the crew’s own choices included:

• Using vitest.config.mts because the named config file failed to load on the repo’s Node version.
• Leaving existing production data alone and flagging it in the pull request.
• Turning the reviewer’s smaller findings into a new ticket.

Mid-build, the assumptions stay open. Each one names the tickets it touches and the builder that made it.

Other moments you may be asked. A station that needs a permission, a prompt or an answer shows as Waiting for you and stays stopped until you reply. Depending on what you chose at crew up, the crew may also wait for your yes before a merge. After the last milestone the orchestrator asks whether the project is finished. With no project left, it asks whether to stop the crew.

For the full walkthrough, see A project, end to end.

Set it up

1. Bring up the crew and plan the project, as described in Get started. The questions arrive once the orchestrator has the project.
2. Open the Crew page in the console, at http://127.0.0.1:8787/crew on a local Tares. Questions waiting for you appear at the top. The project page lists them too, under questions waiting for you.
3. Answer in the orchestrator’s session. Write the answer as you would say it. Tares matches it against your session line by line, so a long pasted reply with several lines or paragraphs is found in full.
4. For a step on your machine, do it and say so. For a station that shows Waiting for you, open its session in a terminal and answer there, or say “continue”.
5. At the end of a milestone, answer the assumptions question. Keep them, or say which to change. To make an answer stand from now on, say so, for this project or for every project.
6. If a station goes Quiet, meaning it has sent nothing for a while, check the crew and bring it back:

tares factory crew status
tares factory crew watch

An Idle station needs nothing from you. It is between ticks, or waiting on its own Monitor or on a peer, and it resumes by itself.

What you get

• A record of every answer. The Decisions fold on the project page holds each question the crew asked and your answer in your own words, newest first. A recorded answer holds up to 4,000 characters.
• A record of every choice the crew made. The Assumptions fold lists each choice and whether you kept it, with the tickets it touches and the builder that made it.
• One question per milestone for the crew’s choices. You review the crew’s choices together instead of one at a time.
• A clear signal when you are needed. The Crew page shows which station is waiting for you, with its last message and the command that opens its session.
• Steering stays with the orchestrator. To change direction, talk to it.

In the worked example, a project went from a spec to eight merged pull requests in about three hours. The person answered five questions: two steps on their machine and three end-of-milestone questions. They kept all five of the crew’s assumptions.

When something else fits

• If you would rather approve every merge yourself, choose that at crew up. The crew then waits for your yes before each merge, and you will see more questions.
• If you want to see what moved without answering anything, open Standup on the Crew page. It reports what is done, started, in review, blocked and waiting on you.

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