Agent Pulse

Agent Pulse is a GitHub Project of your organization. On it the team sees every decision, specification and plan of .rness/, where each one stands, and what an agent is working on right now. Rness writes it; the team reads it.

Create it

rness pulse create    # once per organization: the project, then a first sync

Then commit .rness/rness.json, which now names the project. The project is private, GitHub's default for an organization project.

It needs:

• Issues turned on for .rness, in its GitHub settings: each document becomes an issue of .rness.
• The project scope on each developer's rness login. Rness asks for it where a pulse is declared.

What you see

• A board per collection: ADR, Specs, Plans, and any other directory whose documents carry a status. Its columns are that collection's statuses.
• Working: the documents an agent is working on now.
• All: every document in a table.

Each card is an issue of .rness whose body is the document itself, so a specification reads on the board. Links between documents open in the side panel. The fields:

Field	Holds
Status	The document's status (and ADR status, Specs status, … for each collection's board)
Collection	ADR, Specs, Plans, …
Agent	working while an agent works on it
Working session	The session working on it now: claude · 1a2b3c4d. Emptied when the session ends.
Session history	Every session that wrote or changed it, with its agent: Claude Opus 5.5 · 1e9cb41b-…. Never emptied.
Path	The document's path in .rness/

What keeps it up to date

With Claude Code, you run nothing:

• At session start, the In progress plans of the repository you work in are marked working.
• When the agent edits a document, the document is marked working. A new document gets its card, and a changed status moves its card, within seconds.
• At session end, the session's marks are cleared and the board is synced.

By hand, or from another agent:

rness pulse sync

The hooks start a background process that uses your login, and Claude Code never waits for it. When it cannot write (no login, a missing scope, GitHub unreachable), the next session start says why.

A collection's own project

Agent Pulse shows every collection of .rness/ on one project. A collection whose work stands apart, such as a roadmap or a launch, can have a project of its own:

rness pulse create roadmap    # the project, named after the collection, then a sync

rness.json then names both, and rness pulse sync syncs both:

"projects": { "pulse": 3, "roadmap": 4 }

The collection's documents leave Agent Pulse for their project; their issues stay as they are. The project is written from the collection's files, like the rest of the pulse:

• roadmap/README.md is the project's README. Its front matter can say more:

  ---
  description: What we ship this quarter.   # the project's short description
  statuses: [Idea, Planned, Building, Shipped, Dropped]   # the columns, in order
  fields:
    Target date: { type: date, from: target }   # filled from each document's `target:`
    Area: { type: select, from: area }
  labels: directory   # each document labelled with its subdirectory
  ---

  A field's type is text, date, select or number; from is the front-matter key of the documents that fills it, or a list of keys, the first present one winning. labels is directory, or a front-matter key. A date field adds a Calendar roadmap view: pick its date field once in the view's settings, as GitHub's API cannot set it.

• roadmap/updates/ holds the project's status updates, one file each, named by date:

  ---
  health: on-track   # on-track, at-risk, off-track, complete or inactive
  ---
  The first two items shipped; the third moves to next month.

  Each file is posted once and updated when it changes.

Without a README.md, the project has the collection's documents and nothing more. A workspace that declares no collection's project keeps Agent Pulse as it is.

Things to know

• Access follows .rness: GitHub shows these issues only to people who can read .rness. -label:rness hides them from its Issues tab.
• One way: a change made on the board by hand (a card moved, a field, a title, an issue closed) is written back at the next sync. It never reaches .rness/. Change the document instead.
• Comments are yours: a specification's discussion can live on its issue, and Rness never touches comments.
• Your own items stay yours: a card Rness did not make is never edited, closed or archived.
• A deleted document closes its issue, as not planned.

How an issue's body is written

• The first line is the document's path and a link to the file.
• The front matter and the first heading are left out: they are the fields and the title.
• A link to another document points to that document's issue.
• @name and #12 are escaped, so a body notifies no one and links no wrong issue.
• A document longer than GitHub's 65,536 characters is cut at a blank line, and ends with a link to the rest.

Rate and size

Rness sends one request at a time. A new document costs a few requests; an unchanged one, nothing but its share of the listing. When GitHub's rate limit is hit, Rness waits as long as GitHub says, 10 minutes at most, and the next sync finishes the rest. On a board of 54 documents (2026-09-30), a sync with nothing to change took 4 s.