herdr-swarmlisted

# Herdr Swarm Small-scale swarm protocol, distilled from Cursor's "Agent swarms and the new model economics" (Jul 2026): scalability comes from **context efficiency and coordination discipline**, not raw parallelism. This skill is the orchestration layer; it never touches `herdr` directly — all spawning, collecting, and messaging goes through the **herdr-dispatch** skill's verbs (`doctor`, `assign`, `watch`, `collect`, `send`, `handoff`, `stop`). ## Preconditions 1. herdr-dispatch must be installed and its `doctor` must pass. If not, stop and tell the human. 2. The task must be big enough that one agent would lose context: multiple modules, a full spec, hours of work. For a single-file fix, use herdr-dispatch directly instead. 3. `--worktree` isolation is mandatory for every implementation leaf. Read-only leaves may share the main tree. ## Roles - **Captain (this session) = planner.** Decomposes, decides, arbitrates merge order, reviews. The captain never implements code itself and never hand-waves a design decision into a brief — undecided design questions stop the tree until the captain decides them (or asks the human). - **Workers = executors.** One leaf each. Workers do not plan, do not dispatch, and do not talk to each other. All cross-worker information flows through files the captain points at. - Depth is at most 2 (captain → leaf). Nested captains are forbidden by herdr-dispatch; do not ask for them. ## Scale limits - 3–8 leaves total in the task tree. More mea