Coding Owl is archived. It did not fulfill its core loop, so rather than pivoting or refactoring it, I am building something new from scratch with the lessons learned. Why Coding Owl is archived

ADR-0001

Single `owl` binary for everything headless

Context

Coding Owl has three headless components: the daemon that detects idle time and runs Agents, the user-facing CLI that controls it, and (later) a Runner that executes work on a remote VM and calls home. All three are Go, and they share most of their dependency graph - the protocol types, the client, the config loader.

The obvious prior art splits the daemon out into its own binary: docker and dockerd, tailscale and tailscaled. That split exists to solve privilege separation and to let an ops team deploy the server without the client.

Decision

One cobra entrypoint at cmd/owl, producing one binary:

  • owl daemon run - runs the daemon in the foreground
  • owl daemon install - writes and loads a launchd plist or systemd unit
  • owl runner run --server=... - future remote-Runner mode
  • everything else (owl status, owl add, owl logs, …) acts as a client of the daemon

Consequences

  • One Homebrew formula, one release asset per platform, one file to copy to a VM. Distribution stays trivial for as long as this project is solo.
  • Size overhead is negligible, because the daemon and the CLI already share nearly everything they link.
  • The command tree has to stay disciplined: daemon-only flags must not leak into user-facing commands, and owl --help must not read like a server manual.
  • If a stripped-down Runner artifact is ever genuinely needed, adding cmd/owl-runner as a thin main importing internal/runner costs nothing and changes no other code. Do not pre-split for it.

Alternatives considered

Separate owld binary. Rejected. The problems the two-binary pattern solves - running the daemon as a different user, shipping server and client to different machines, letting distro packagers split them - are problems this project does not have. A single-user laptop tool pays the packaging cost for none of the benefit.