Local PTY model

Every Worker in a Hive is a real CLI process running in a local pseudo-terminal — a PTY — that SwarmADE spawns and drives on your machine. SwarmADE does not reimplement your CLI or call it over an API; it launches the actual binary in a PTY, feeds it input, and streams its output live into that Worker’s panel. What you see in the panel is exactly what the CLI is doing, in real time.

Where execution happens

The Queen and the Drones run server-side, but the Workers do not. Each PTY lives on your hardware, and the CLI inside it reads and writes your files directly. Your code never leaves your machine to reach a Worker model except through your own CLI’s normal authentication and provider — the same path that CLI would use if you ran it by hand in a terminal.

The orchestration flow is a clean separation: the Queen plans the work and sends instructions down to your machine, the Worker in its PTY carries those instructions out locally, and the results stream back up to the Queen. The server coordinates; your machine executes.

Cross-platform PTYs

SwarmADE spawns a native pseudo-terminal on every supported desktop platform — macOS, Linux, and Windows — so the same Worker model behaves consistently wherever you run it. On each platform SwarmADE manages the PTY lifecycle: spawning the process, streaming its output, forwarding your input and approvals, and cleaning it up when the Worker stops.

Why a PTY

Running each CLI in a genuine pseudo-terminal — rather than a plain captured subprocess — means the tools behave the way they do for you interactively: progress output, prompts, and terminal control sequences all work. That fidelity is what lets SwarmADE drive a CLI as faithfully as a human at the keyboard while still coordinating it as part of the Swarm.

Next steps

To set up the CLIs that become Workers, see CLI bridging setup. To control what a Worker may do inside its PTY, see Permissions.