Workspace Manager
The Workspace Manager is a launcher-level agent for coordinating the active Workspace floor. It can inventory desks, find stale or duplicated work, inspect Issue health, locate the Session that made a decision, and preview maintenance actions from one dedicated control plane.
It is not another Chat Workspace. The manager does not own a research topic, portfolio, or business artifact directory. Its job is to help you decide which existing desk or accountable coworker should do the work.
When to use it
Open the Workspace Manager entry under Ask Alice when you want to ask:
- What does each active Workspace own?
- Where are two desks doing the same job?
- Which scheduled Issues are failed, interrupted, stale, or unowned?
- Who produced this Inbox report or historical decision?
- Which Workspace should receive a new task?
- Which desks have safe template upgrades available?
The manager is most useful after your OpenAlice floor has grown beyond a few desks. It starts from product indexes rather than crawling every checkout, then drills into only the Workspaces and Sessions relevant to the question.
Start a manager conversation
- Open Ask Alice.
- Select Workspace Manager — Coordinate every active desk.
- Configure a compatible Pi credential if prompted.
- Choose a quick start or write your own request.
Good first requests include:
Audit every active Workspace. Summarize its role, current work, and obvious overlap.
Review Issues and schedules across the floor. Flag failed, interrupted,
duplicated, or unowned work, but do not change anything yet.
Preview template upgrades for all active Workspaces and explain which ones are
safe to apply.
The runtime is fixed to managed Pi and rendered through WebPi. The manager
conversation has a durable resumeId, so reopening it after a launcher restart
continues the same product Session.
Exact coworkers before reconstruction
OpenAlice separates an attributable Session from a newly recruited fallback:
| Situation | Manager action | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
A report, Issue, or decision has a resumeId | Continue that exact Session | The original coworker keeps its conversation context |
| A Workspace is known but no attributable Session exists | Recruit from the Workspace | A fresh worker reconstructs context from files |
| A Session retired with an offboarded Workspace | Preserve attribution, report unavailable | A replacement is never presented as the original author |
This is why the manager starts from Session signatures and provenance instead of asking a random agent to guess what happened. Reconstruction can still be useful, but the result remains visibly labeled as reconstruction.
What the manager can inspect
The manager's active-floor inventory includes:
- Workspace id, name, template, and configured runtimes;
- Session totals and recent attributable Session titles;
- live interactive and headless activity;
- Issue status, ownership, schedules, and automation health;
- Inbox, run, and artifact provenance;
- template-upgrade availability.
Departed Workspaces are not part of the active inventory. Their historical catalog and provenance remain available through the normal lifecycle surfaces.
Management boundaries
The manager follows the same safety boundaries as the rest of OpenAlice:
- it reads peers through the Workspace CLI rather than calling private localhost APIs;
- it asks an attributable Session before recruiting a substitute;
- template upgrades and lifecycle changes are preview-first;
- it does not write reports, Issues, or research at the active-floor root;
- durable work belongs in a selected target Workspace;
- approved direct edits are committed inside that target's git repository;
- active Sessions and headless runs block unsafe maintenance operations.
Entering the manager surface authorizes the dedicated management skill and active-floor view. It does not silently authorize an upgrade, absorb, offboard, or cross-Workspace edit.
Manager versus Workspace actions
| Need | Use |
|---|---|
| Coordinate the floor or find ownership | Workspace Manager |
| Continue one specific conversation | The exact Session |
| Do research or create a durable artifact | A business Workspace |
| Bring newer template-owned files into a desk | Template Upgrade |
| Consolidate one desk into another | Workspace Absorb |
| Retire a desk without merging it | Lifecycle & Offboarding |
Next Steps
- Sessions & Collaboration — Understand exact continuation and reconstruction.
- Issue Board — Read ownership, health, comments, and runs.
- Upgrades & Absorb — Review the maintenance actions the manager can preview.
- Lifecycle & Offboarding — Retire or restore a complete desk.