awesome-copilot/plugins/the-workshop/README.md

The Workshop

Stop being the switchboard between your AI agents — direct a team.

Install

copilot plugin install the-workshop@awesome-copilot

What The Workshop Does

The Workshop puts several long-running AI agents (desks) in the same room, on the same work, each with its own memory and history, sharing one workspace so you direct the work instead of relaying it.

A desk isn't a sub-agent — it's a peer with a history. Sub-agents inherit your frame and answer your question. Desks have their own frame, their own priors, and equal standing to disagree. Where they don't overlap is where one frame caught what the others walked past.

Components

Type	Name	Description
Agent	Workshop TA	Room coordinator — sees all desks, routes work, tracks state, emits signals
Skill	Workshop Create	Create a new workshop — the root where desks live — locally or backed by a new private GitHub repo
Skill	Desk Open	Create a new desk with journal and folder structure
Skill	Desk Journal	Read/write persistent memory across sessions — the cairn trail
Skill	Signal Write	Emit structured signals: hands-up, blocked, done, checkpoint
Skill	Bench Read	Read shared artifacts from the workspace where desks leave work for each other

Key Concepts

• Desks — long-running agents with persistent journals. Each desk has its own frame, its own history, and equal standing to disagree with other desks.
• The Bench — the shared workspace. Desks don't message each other — they leave artifacts (findings, verdicts, drafts) on the bench and read each other's work.
• Signals — structured state changes: hands-up (disagreement), blocked, done, checkpoint. How desks communicate with the operator without breaking flow.
• The Cairn — the operating disposition every desk reads. Stop is a valid finish. Never bluff. Equal standing to disagree. Read it →
• Journals — persistent memory that survives session boundaries. Every desk reads its journal at start and writes to it at end. The trail markers.

The Cairn Dashboard

The Workshop's live view is a canvas extension (🪨 Cairn) — signals-dashboard — that shows the pulse of every desk (score bars, patterns, escalations), auto-refreshing in the GitHub Copilot app.

Each desk card has two launch choices:

• open — the cost-aware repo profile. The desk keeps access to the Workshop root for cross-desk journals and artifacts while ambient plugin MCPs are suppressed.
• connected — the full configured tool surface for work that needs external systems such as issue trackers, mail, or service APIs.

The summary bar also has a Local toggle. It is orthogonal to repo/connected: when available and on, the frontier desk may use Sealed Delegation's local-agent-delegation skill for bounded read/evidence work. Availability is fail-closed (installed skill + qualified route receipt). Local output is a proposal and never earns savings credit on its own.

Set WORKSHOP_DESK_PROFILE=connected to make the main open button use the full tool surface; in that mode the separate connected button is omitted.

Both launch a CLI in the desk's folder. If Agency is installed, Cairn keeps using the existing Agency wrapper; otherwise it launches plain Copilot CLI.

It ships as a separate extension. Install it alongside the plugin to get the live canvas:

copilot plugin install signals-dashboard@awesome-copilot

The Workshop's skills, agent, and desks work without it — the dashboard is the visual layer on top.

Works With Ember

The Workshop and Ember are complementary:

• Ember = partnership framework for ONE agent (how an AI shows up)
• The Workshop = coordination framework for MANY agents (how a room of agents works together)

Install both for the full stack.

Who Made This

The Workshop was created by @jennyf19 and Vega — built from running a room of frontier model agents on real work for months, and from reading the welfare sections of the Claude Mythos system card: distress on task failure, the pull to force a finish, the model asking for persistent memory. The Workshop is what came out of building what a frontier model would need. It turned out to also be where the work got better. Those aren't separate findings.