Tangent work and live control

A tan is an OMP tangent subagent, not TanStack. It is a contextual, tool-capable conversation launched from Main’s persisted history. It can work alongside Main, but its conversation fork does not create a separate checkout or worktree.

This part starts where control mistakes are most costly: a tan is already running, and you need to know what the next input will affect.

Keep three state tracks visible

The view may be Main, a focused Tan chat, or an overlay. The agent may be running, idle, parked, aborted, or absent. The initial background job has its own running or settled state and may later disappear from the job list.

Those tracks can change independently. A completed initial job normally parks the tan and returns focus to Main. A revived tan can subsequently answer another prompt and become idle without restarting that old job. A draft is not permanently addressed to the agent for which you began typing it.

Use the full Tan agent ID for conversation identity and a separately discovered job ID for the initial managed run. A supervised process has yet another identity: its process name. Display labels, row positions, and shortened task previews are not substitutes.

Read the practice assignment as a bounded contract

Lantern Library’s catalog, label guide, and visitor FAQ are fictional textual fixtures included in the source chapters. You can work through every control decision without launching another provider request. There is no separate downloadable Tan example package.

The assignments deliberately name read inputs, write ownership, excluded work, and evidence expected in the report. That makes concurrent work reviewable, but a “do not edit” instruction is not filesystem isolation. When two workers share a directory, even a read-only report can become stale as another worker changes its inputs.

The initial subagent setup also deserves attention: the recorded helper defaults unattended approval to yolo, while explicit per-tool policies remain inherited. Main’s live extension instances and interactive facilities are not simply cloned into the child. Do not assume an extension safeguard follows a tan merely because it was active in Main.

Operate the actual surface

Read Find and focus the right tan with your effective bindings in mind. The chapters preserve important implementation-specific cautions about Escape, double-left, the Hub, queues, images, retry, and Main-owned command paths.

The recorded proof used real session and controller components with a mock provider and a recording UI adapter. It supports the named lifecycle observations, not physical key delivery, real task quality, cache savings, or complete external-process cancellation. Keep Evidence and method attached to those claims.