Helm

Taking the helm of the agents already on your machine.

Built by Jimuelle Patron · MIT · github.com/Jimuelle07/Helm

Helm is an orchestration harness: it inventories the coding agents installed on this machine (probe.py), routes a task to the best one (route.py), dispatches it and judges whether the work actually got done (supervise.py). The routing and the judging are done by TypeSafe Jev, a typed decision model — that is what lets the orchestration run on every task instead of only the expensive ones.

Why this exists

An LLM does not know its own tools unless they are called. A coding agent learns what it can do from a tool list in its prompt, so the six other agent CLIs sitting in the same PATH — each with a different model, price, context window, and speciality — are simply invisible to it. Worse, when an agent does stray outside its competence, it finds out by failing: attempt, burn tokens, retry, apologise. The knowledge is produced after paying for it, then thrown away when the session ends.

This skill fixes that by splitting the problem into three jobs and giving each to the thing that is cheapest and safest at it:

The probe observes. Jev judges. The chosen agent generates.

The probe reads the machine (no model calls). Jev — a System One model that returns typed decisions rather than text — picks from an answer space built from what the probe found. Only then does a real coding agent write code.

The keystone is that last point. The list of options handed to Jev is constructed from the installed agents, so recommending something that is not on the machine is structurally impossible, not merely unlikely. That is the whole reason to use a typed decision model here instead of asking an LLM to please only suggest installed tools.

What Jev costs, and why that matters to you

One routing call is seven questions in a single request, answered independently and in parallel: agent, task_kind, blast_radius, spec_clarity, context_breadth, needs_human, reversible. Measured: 0.7 s, 2,149 input tokens, $0.00009 — input is $0.042 per million tokens and output is billed at zero.

Two consequences worth internalising:

• Run it freely. route.py is cheap enough to call before any substantial build, not just the ones that look hard. You do not need to ration it or decide in advance whether a task "deserves" routing.
• Never read a worker transcript yourself. Judging completion is the expensive part of orchestration: a 50k-token transcript costs real money to read and permanently fills your context with build noise you carry for the rest of the session. supervise.py sends it to Jev for about a fifth of a cent and hands you a few hundred bytes — outcome, confidence, what to do next, and a path to the log if you ever genuinely need it. Open that log only when the verdict tells you to.

Setting up Jev (required, once per user)

Jev is the decision layer, so this is a prerequisite, not an enhancement. route.py and supervise.py exit immediately without a key; probe.py still prints its inventory (you need to see it while setting up) and exits non-zero.

This skill is shared across a team, so the Jev API key is never bundled with it — each person authenticates with their own TypeSafe account, the same way they would with gh auth login or a database credential. probe.py reports whether a key is currently configured and, if not, tells you the exact command to fix it.

If probe.py reports no key configured, ask the user for their TypeSafe API key (from docs.typesafe.ai / their TypeSafe account) and run:

python scripts/route.py --set-api-key apikey_...

This stores the key locally at ~/.cache/helm/credentials.json (owner-only permissions on POSIX) and it is picked up on every future call — nothing else to configure. --clear-api-key removes it. Confirm it works with one live request:

python scripts/probe.py --check-jev

A TYPESAFE_API_KEY environment variable, if set, always takes precedence over the stored key, which is useful for CI or a temporary override without disturbing what is stored.

Never print, log, or echo the key itself — confirmation messages only ever show a masked form (apike...bf32).

If the user declines to set one, say plainly that Helm cannot route without it. You can still use probe.py's inventory — knowing what is installed and logged in is genuinely useful on its own — and offer your own opinion as your own, clearly labelled. Never present that as a Helm routing decision; the whole value of one is that it came from a judge calibrated against recorded traces, and yours did not.

The workflow

All paths are relative to this skill's directory. Run steps 1 and 2 in order; step 3 is opt-in.

1. See what the machine has

python scripts/probe.py --repo .

Prints hardware, every installed agent with its version and one-line competence, which ones are routable, and whether the Jev decision layer is configured. Results cache for 24 hours (--refresh to force a re-probe; --json for the raw registry).

A non-zero exit with a DECISION LAYER (required) warning means the key is missing. Fix that before step 2 — there is nothing for route.py to do until you have.

Run this whenever the user asks what they have available, or before any routing decision. It calls no models, so it is cheap and safe to run eagerly.

It also asks each CLI whether it is logged in. Installing a coding agent and authenticating it are separate acts, and people routinely do the first without the second — the CLI then looks perfectly healthy until the moment it tries to call a model. Agents that their own status command reports as logged out appear under INSTALLED BUT NOT AUTHENTICATED with the exact fix command, and are excluded from routing so no task is handed to an agent that cannot run it.

If you see that block, tell the user which agent and give them the one-line fix. They log in, and the next run picks it up immediately — logged-out agents are re-checked on every invocation rather than waiting out the cache. Use --no-verify-auth to skip the check when you only need a fast inventory.

2. Route a task

python scripts/route.py "add retry logic with backoff to the payment client"

Feeds the task plus the registry to Jev, applies the thresholds, and prints a decision: the chosen agent, the exact command to run it, the signals behind the call, and — when it declines to auto-execute — precisely which gate stopped it.

Useful flags: --repo PATH for repository context, --json for the full verdict, --execute to actually run the agent.

The printed command is tuned to the task, not generic. Jev's metrics are translated into that agent's own flags and keywords before the command is shown:

RECOMMEND -> Cursor Agent (cursor-agent)
  command:
    cursor-agent -w -p refactor the payment client to use the new retry helper ...
  modes injected: sandbox

blast_radius came back at 2.5, so the change runs in a git worktree rather than the live tree. A review task gets gemini --approval-mode plan and literally cannot write; a scaffold task gets an architecture-first preamble; a wide refactor gets told to fan out across sub-agents. The four rules and their thresholds are in references/dispatch-modes.md.

Two things to tell the user when they come up:

• modes this agent cannot express: sandbox means the chosen CLI has no way to do what the metrics asked for. It is not an error, but it is worth saying out loud on a high-blast task — offer a worktree, or a different agent.
• caveat: injected flags for X are unverified means that flag came from the CLI cheat sheet rather than from the CLI's own --help. The accompanying note names the source. Six agents (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode, copilot) were verified against a live --help; the rest are documented but unconfirmed.

3. Hand off, and let Jev tell you when it is done

Default behaviour is to recommend, not to run. Prefer showing the user the command and letting them decide. Reach for --execute only when the user has clearly asked you to just do it, and even then the gates in scripts/route.py can still refuse.

When you do dispatch, go through the supervisor rather than running the agent yourself:

python scripts/supervise.py codex "fix the failing test in src/parser.py"
python scripts/supervise.py claude "..." --watch --timeout 900

To get the same task-tuned flags when driving the supervisor directly, hand it the routing decision:

python scripts/route.py "..." --json > /tmp/decision.json
python scripts/supervise.py claude "..." --signals-file /tmp/decision.json

--execute on route.py does this for you. Without signals the supervisor dispatches the card's plain base contract — which is the old behaviour, deliberately: nothing here widens an agent's permissions on the strength of a metric nobody supplied. --no-modes forces that base contract even when signals are present.

Do not read the worker's transcript to decide whether it finished. That is the single most expensive thing you can do here: agent transcripts run to tens of thousands of tokens, and reading one costs real money and permanently fills your context with build noise you then carry for the rest of the session.

supervise.py hands the transcript to Jev instead — input is $0.042 per million tokens and output is free, so judging a 50k-token run costs a fraction of a cent. What comes back to you is a few hundred bytes:

DONE -- codex (completed)
  Edited src/parser.py and ran the suite: 14 passed
  confidence 0.88 | satisfied 0.91 | needs_human 0.08 | awaiting_input 0.02
  exit 0 after 47.2s | judged by jev
  next: accept
  full transcript: /tmp/helm-runs/codex-1758...log

Act on next, and only open the transcript if it says review or you have a specific reason. That choice — the log being somewhere you can look rather than something that arrives unbidden — is where the saving actually comes from.

--watch polls the run while it is in flight and stops it early if Jev sees it going in circles or waiting for input. That second case is worth the flag on its own: an agent running headless sometimes asks a clarifying question and then waits for an answer that can never arrive, and without --watch it burns the entire timeout before anyone notices.

Reading the output

The mode field is the decision:

Every verdict is Jev's, so source is always jev — it stays in the output because traces are calibrated per model version, not because there is an alternative.

What varies, and what you should report, is confidence and the gates. Jev returns a distribution rather than a pick, so a low confidence is real information: it usually means two agents are a genuine near-tie, not that the system is unsure of itself. Say which agent and why, then say what stopped it running. "Cursor Agent, because it indexes the repo semantically — but needs_human came back 0.62, so I'd rather you approve it first" is the shape to aim for.

For a dispatched run, supervise.py returns outcome and next:

no_op and stuck are the two that matter most, because an exit code cannot see either. Agents exit 0 after announcing what they would do, and exit 0 after asking a question into the void. If you were checking rc == 0, both would read as success.

Recovery

no_op, stuck and failed are diagnoses, not dead ends, and most agents ship the cure. The supervisor retries once by default, injecting that agent's own recovery move — Aider's /undo before a retry, an explicit "you are headless, nobody can answer you" preamble for a stuck run, an apply-the-edits-now instruction for a no-op. The verdict then carries an attempts list:

DONE -- claude (completed)
  note: recovery: no_op: re-dispatch with an explicit apply-the-edits instruction
  note: recovered and retried 1 time(s); outcomes: no_op -> done

--retry 0 disables it; --retry 2 allows two. All attempts share the one --timeout budget, so a retry never doubles the wall clock you asked for.

Two cases deliberately never retry. A timeout may have left the tree half-modified, and re-dispatching onto unknown partial state turns one bad run into two. And an unjudged run never retries — if Jev could not be reached after the agent ran, nobody knows what it did to the workspace, which is the worst possible basis for doing it again. You will see not retrying: the run was never judged by Jev when that happens.

When Jev is unreachable

Helm stops. There is no second scorer, and this is a deliberate design choice rather than a missing feature.

The reasoning: the questions Helm asks are precisely the ones local heuristics answer badly. "Did the agent do the work or describe it?" needs a reader, not a keyword scan. "Which of these agents fits this task?" needs the fit between a task and a competence, not a scoring formula. A fallback that cannot tell would be confidently wrong on exactly the cases the tool exists to catch, so Helm says it does not know instead.

What to do when it happens. Run python scripts/probe.py --check-jev — it makes one real inference call and names the failing stage. If the key is missing, offer the --set-api-key command. If the API is down, tell the user Helm is unavailable and give them your own recommendation as your own, clearly labelled. Never present your guess as a Helm routing decision.

If a run ends error with "the agent ran but Jev could not judge the result", tell the user the workspace may have been modified and point them at the transcript path in the verdict. Do not re-dispatch.

Presenting a recommendation

Lead with the choice and the reason, keep the machinery in the background, and be honest about uncertainty. Something like:

For a repo-wide rename, cursor-agent is the better fit here — it indexes the repository semantically, so it can find every call site before editing. Claude Code is the runner-up if you would rather have it reason through the edge cases.

cursor-agent -p "rename Client to ApiClient across the repo and update all call sites"

Confidence was 0.62, below the auto-execute bar, so this is a recommendation rather than something I would run unattended.

Avoid dumping raw JSON at the user unless they asked for it. The signals exist to justify the call, not to be recited.

Adding or correcting an agent

Capability cards in scripts/cards/*.json are the declared knowledge that makes this work without invoking anything. To teach the router a new agent, add one file. To fix a bad routing decision, the card text is usually the right thing to change — the competence line is what Jev actually reads, so it is a tuned parameter, not documentation.

See references/capability-cards.md for the schema and how to write a competence line that discriminates well.

Further reading

Load these only when the task calls for them:

• references/walkthrough.md — full install-to-end-to-end example with real output; read this first if you are unsure how the pieces fit together
• references/capability-cards.md — card schema, writing good competence lines, adding an agent
• references/dispatch-modes.md — how a Jev metric becomes a CLI flag: the five modes, the four rules, the recovery table, and which flags are verified
• references/jev-decision-layer.md — the question set, why each question exists, Jev API details
• references/calibration.md — the thresholds, why they are currently guesses, and how to fit them against recorded traces

Three things worth knowing

Undetected credentials are not absent credentials. The probe distinguishes two things that are easy to conflate. We could not find a credential means nothing — tokens live in keychains and browser sessions no probe can enumerate — so it never blocks. The tool's own status command said it is logged out is authoritative, and does block. Only the second is a reason to route elsewhere; mention the first as a caveat and move on.

Every decision is logged to ~/.cache/helm/decisions.jsonl, because the thresholds in route.py and supervise.py are honest guesses until there are real traces to fit them against. If the user disagrees with a routing call, that disagreement is the valuable signal — note it, and point them at references/calibration.md.

Nothing here auto-executes on a weak signal. Every gate in route.py is a reason to show the user a command instead of running it, and the thresholds are set to prefer that. A low-confidence Jev verdict is still a recommendation, not an instruction — report the confidence and the blocking gate rather than rounding it up to "this is the one". And if a run came back error because Jev could not judge it, never say "it's done": say nobody checked, and point at the transcript.