Claude worker seat: live hire, message and completion (VUH-1458)

2026-09-30, Claude Code 2.1.285, herdr 0.9.1, this Mac. Code at 8be22bee (adapter, plugin hooks, clankie seat-hook) and 7431b8c8 (hire wiring).

What ran

live-hire.mts hires a real interactive Claude Code seat through HerdrWatchStore.spawnSeat with the Claude worker adapter and this Mac's real consent state, in a gitignored scratch directory inside the trusted checkout. Claude's folder-trust prompt blocks a fresh /tmp directory, and that decision was left alone. It then messages the seat, arms a completion watch, reads the native transcript, and closes the pane. The service was not restarted; hook posts went to a local capture server in the script.

The harness changed two things on purpose, logged as START_ARGS:

• It dropped the fallback's --dangerously-load-development-channels server:clankie-seat, so no script accepted the owner's development-channel warning.
• It loaded the worker plugin inline (--plugin-dir, hooks only, no channel) to prove the Stop hook chain in the real TUI.

Result (live-hire.txt)

• Hire: spawned, with control: { mode: "terminal", reason: "consent_required", detail: "clankie-worker@clankie is not installed.", fix }. The adapter blocked before launching anything, and the hire took the terminal lane in the same pane, as designed.
• Brief: pasted and verified in the native transcript; Claude answered brief-done.
• Message: sendToSeat delivered; Claude answered follow-up-done.
• Completion: the watch armed on the running turn and woke when it settled.
• Hooks: the plugin's real SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit and Stop hooks reached clankie seat-hook, which posted /v1/fleet/seats/<pane>/hook with the right session and Claude's own final text (lastMessage: "brief-done", then "follow-up-done").
• Cleanup: pane closed (CLOSE true), scratch directory removed.

An earlier run with a brief that wrote a file blocked on Claude's own permission prompt. The seat read blocked, and the follow-up was refused rather than typed into the prompt.

Not yet verified live

Channel delivery (brief and messages as clankie-worker channel events, with the adapter holding the seat and settling watches from Stop hooks) needs James's one-time consent: install the plugin (disabled) and approve it in managed settings, both named in the hire's fix. Unit tests cover that path (apps/clankie/test/claude-worker-seat.test.ts, seat-adapter-hire.test.ts). After approval, rerun the script without the harness's startAgent override and expect control.mode: "adapter".