Rover Help

Welcome to Mission Control. This is the short version of what the Rover does and how you drive it. Roughly ten percent astronaut, ninety percent practical.

How to dispatch

/autonomous:rover "<mission brief>"
/autonomous:rover https://github.com/owner/repo/issues/N
/autonomous:rover .autonomous/<NAME>.md         # wake an existing mission

On dispatch, the Rover writes .autonomous/<NAME>.md, the mission file that holds context, plan, Done criteria, decision audit, and a timestamped log. Then it sets up a Claude Code cron that fires the loop every minute while the REPL is idle and runs the first SURVEY iteration in the same turn.

The mission file is your window. Tail it to watch the traverse.

What the Rover does

You dispatch a Rover at a task. You stay back. The Rover rolls across the codebase on its own, surveying terrain, driving changes, inspecting its own work, stowing the build-time clutter, and standing by for new signals. It does not radio home for every fork in the traverse; it carries a decide framework and a pride check so it can keep moving without waking you up.

The stance: festina lente. Hasten slowly. A Rover in a hurry drives into a crevasse. The operator is not in a hurry either.

Phase machine

SURVEY ──► DRIVE ──► INSPECT ──► STOW ──► STANDBY
    ▲           ▲            │                  │
    │           └────────────┘                  │
    └──────── new signals ────────────────────────┘

• SURVEY. Read the codebase, form hypotheses, lock down a plan, write Done criteria via verify --propose.
• DRIVE. Build. Commit per logical step. Verify as you go.
• INSPECT. Four passes: verify against Done criteria, pride contrarian review (hard gate on every artefact the Rover produced, prose as well as code), end-user walkthrough, technical plan-vs-diff. Any failure sends the Rover back to DRIVE.
• STOW. Mechanical cleanup only. Debug prints gone, unused imports gone, half-finished refactors finished. Separate commit.
• STANDBY. Watch channels (PR comments, CI, uncommitted work). Back off the cron as idleness grows. Auto-stop after about five hours of quiet.

How to steer a running Rover

• Talk to it in the session. Your turns take priority; the cron waits for idle.
• Write into ## Input in the mission file. The Rover reads that section each STANDBY tick and acts on it.
• Stop it. Use the stop flow (currently reached via the Rover entry; writes a final log entry, cuts the cron, and transmits a home communiqué).
• Resume a stopped Rover. Re-dispatch with the mission file path.

Related commands you can call directly

What the Rover will never do on its own

• Ask "A or B?" mid-phase (it uses decide instead)
• Push to a remote without explicit operator go
• Transition out of DRIVE with a dirty working tree
• Hand off any artefact (code, docs, prose, research brief, media, communiqué) without a logged pride pass covering it
• Call a mission done without ticked Done criteria and evidence

Cost awareness

A cron at one-minute cadence drives many Claude turns during active phases. That is the point: the Rover is working for you. During STANDBY the backoff grows to 60-minute intervals and auto-stops after sustained quiet. For small tasks, a normal conversation is cheaper than a full Rover dispatch.

The Rover keeps reasoning on your session model and offloads the mechanical work to Sonnet subagents: STANDBY polling (git status, PR comments, CI checks) and the INSPECT technical pass (diff-vs-plan review). Hand work to subagents, keep head work on the session model. Your model choice for the session sets the ceiling on quality; the subagent floor is Sonnet.

Standing by for mission parameters.