Gastown Sling — Dispatching Tasks to Polecats

Architecture

Polecats run on the coordinator (i9-zfs-pop:4000), not on Pi workers. Pi workers with GASTOWN_ROLE=polecat_worker are BEAM federation nodes that suppress coordinator-only services (rate limiter). They don't receive polecats.

active polecats in /api/health = tasks currently running on coordinator. 0 = idle (normal).

Sling API

# Submit and immediately dispatch
curl -s -X POST http://10.0.2.230:4000/api/sling \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"description": "task prompt here", "runtime": "claude"}'
# → {"ok":true, "bead_id":"gt-xxxxx", "runtime":"claude"}

# Check bead status
curl -s http://10.0.2.230:4000/api/sling/gt-xxxxx

# List all beads
curl -s -H 'Authorization: Bearer $GASTOWN_API_TOKEN' http://10.0.2.230:4000/api/beads

Available Runtimes

Default: claude (or stub if baseline mode off).

Writing Good Bead Descriptions

The description is the full prompt sent to the runtime. Be specific:

# Good — self-contained, actionable
curl -X POST http://10.0.2.230:4000/api/sling \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "description": "Clone all public repos from github.com/ryanmaclean to Gitea at http://10.0.2.230:3001. Use the Gitea API at /api/v1/repos/migrate. Token in GITEA_TOKEN env var. Work in /tmp/sync-$(date +%s). Log progress. When done, list all synced repos.",
    "runtime": "claude"
  }'

Mix Task (local only)

# On i9, inside elixir-gastown dir
mix gastown.sling BEAD_ID --runtime claude

Bead States

open → in_progress → done | failed | abandoned

Common Mistakes