CLI Workers

The Workers inside a Hive are the AI coding CLIs you already use — Claude, Codex, opencode, Aider, Cline, Goose, Cursor — running locally on your machine. They are the hands of the Swarm: the Queen plans the work server-side, and the Workers execute it on your files.

Workers run locally

Each Worker is a CLI process running in its own local terminal (a PTY) inside the Hive. Output streams live into that Worker’s panel, so you see exactly what each CLI is doing in real time. Nothing about a Worker runs in the cloud — the Queen and the Drones are server-side, but the Workers themselves stay on your hardware. For the details, see Local PTY model.

The Workers available in a Hive are the ones you enabled in the Pre-flight Wizard when you created it. Before a CLI can become a Worker it has to be installed and authenticated on your machine — see Bringing Your CLI.

Adding and removing Workers

You manage a Hive’s roster from its Worker controls:

• Add a Worker — pick any enabled CLI and it spawns a fresh terminal panel in the Hive, ready to join the Swarm.
• Remove a Worker — stop it to close its terminal and drop it from the active Swarm. The CLI stays installed; it is just no longer part of this Hive.

You can adjust the roster at any time, including mid-task, to match the work in front of you.

Workers and Honey

Worker CLI calls do not consume Honey — they bill against your own CLI subscription, so running more Workers does not draw down your SwarmADE allowance. Honey is spent only on server-side work: Queen planning and Drone reviews. Even so, size your Swarm to the task — a single Worker for a focused change, several for a broad parallel effort.

Together, the local Workers and the server-side Queen are the core loop of a Hive: you submit a spec, the Queen decomposes it, and your Workers carry it out under your control.