Agent lifecycle
- Provisioning — a warm VM is claimed from the pool
- Running — the coding agent is active, working on the task
- Idle — the agent finished its turn and waits for follow-ups, events, or timeout
- Sleep — VM is suspended. Compute charges stop, state is preserved. Wake to resume.
- Wake — the same VM resumes in seconds with session state intact
- Kill — the agent session is persisted and the VM is terminated
Session modes
| Mode | Description | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous (default) | Headless. Agent works until done, then idles. | Fire-and-forget tasks, PR creation |
| Streaming | Bidirectional session channel | Dashboard live view, programmatic interaction |
--on-idle flag on murmur spawn.
Slugs and identity
Every agent has a slug — a short identifier you choose at spawn time (e.g.fix-auth-bug). Slugs are DNS-label-safe (lowercase, alphanumeric, hyphens). The full agent identity combines your account and slug — e.g. alice/fix-auth-bug.
Recursive spawning
Agents can spawn children, and children can spawn children. This is the foundation of multi-agent orchestration. The parent receives achild_lifecycle event when children complete or fail. See the multi-agent orchestration guide.
Follow-ups and queue
You can send messages to running agents viamurmur queue add or the queue_add MCP tool. Messages are queued and delivered when the agent is ready (between turns). The dequeue strategy controls how many queued messages are delivered per turn — all at once (default), one, or up to five.
Session resurrection and forking
Resurrect resumes a prior session — same slug, same branch, full conversation history. Fork branches off another agent’s session into a new independent agent. Both are flags onmurmur spawn.
Agent personas
An agent persona is a reusable configuration that defines a system prompt, model preference, tools, and constraints. Spawn with a persona using the--agent flag on murmur spawn.
Backend selection
Agents run Claude Code by default. Pass a Codex model or--backend codex on murmur spawn to use Codex instead. The --reasoning-effort flag controls thinking depth.
| Type | Page |
|---|---|
| Reference | murmur spawn |
| Reference | murmur status |
| Reference | murmur kill |
| Reference | murmur ls |
| Reference | agent |
| Guide | Multi-agent orchestration |
| Guide | Dashboard |
| Concept | Agent Personas |
| Concept | Workspaces |
| Concept | Events |
| Concept | Flights |