Baton

Baton is a Go implementation of Symphony.

What Baton does

• Polls your tracker (Linear by default) for claimable issues and reserves an isolated workspace per issue.
• Starts codex app-server from the workspace, streams a workflow prompt, and keeps the session alive until the issue resolves to Done, Closed, Cancelled, or Duplicate.
• Provides injected tracker_* tools so runtime backends can interact with the configured tracker without repeated authentication.
• Cleans up workspaces once issues leave the active state and shuts down agents cleanly.

Supported backends

• Agent runtimes: codex, opencode, claudecode.
• Trackers: linear, jira.

Preparing your repository

1. Align your repository with harness engineering practices so Baton can run reliably.
2. Write a WORKFLOW.md that follows the tracker/workspace/hooks/agent/agent_runtime schema described in the SPEC and use YAML front matter for configuration.
3. Export tracker credentials such as LINEAR_API_KEY so hooks and tools can authenticate.
4. Copy the helper skills you need (commit, push, pull, land, linear) and ensure the runtime can inject Baton’s tracker_* tools into the agent backend you use.
5. Mirror any custom tracker states (e.g., Rework, Human Review, Merging) in your workflow configuration and tracker settings so Baton’s lifecycle matches expectations.

Configuration highlights

• Put workspace bootstrapping commands like git clone ... . into hooks.after_create.
• codex.command should launch codex app-server with your chosen sandbox policies; Baton uses workspace-scoped sandboxes by default and accepts strings or objects for approval policies.
• agent_runtime.kind supports codex, opencode, and claudecode.
• tracker.kind supports linear and jira.
• Path values support ~ and $VAR; Baton resolves them before spawning child processes.
• Environment-backed fields such as tracker.linear.api_key can be set to $LINEAR_API_KEY so Baton reads the correct runtime value.
• If WORKFLOW.md is missing or invalid, Baton refuses to start so you notice configuration issues immediately.

Running Baton

cd /Users/goranka/Engineer/ai/backagent/baton
go build -o bin/baton ./cmd/baton
./bin/baton --i-understand-that-this-will-be-running-without-the-usual-guardrails WORKFLOW.md

• Provide the workflow path as the lone positional argument; it defaults to WORKFLOW.md.
• Flags:
  • --logs-root overrides the default logs directory (current working directory).
  • --i-understand-that-this-will-be-running-without-the-usual-guardrails acknowledges the experimental nature of the agent runner and is required to start Baton.
• Baton installs signal handlers so Ctrl+C gracefully stops agents and closes Codex sessions.

Observability & Testing

• Logs land under the configured logs root (default: logs/) and include workspace paths and workflow metadata for each agent invocation.
• The optional HTTP API exposes state at /api/v1/state, /api/v1/<issue_identifier>, and /api/v1/refresh for troubleshooting.
• Run go test ./... to cover the CLI, workflow parsing, and orchestration code; there is no single make target yet, but the Go test suite exercises the main packages involved in running Baton.