hack-house/CLAUDE.md

hack-house — Claude operating guide

Encrypted collaborative terminal sessions with a summoned, shareable sandbox. Rust TUI client (hh/) + Python server & operator bridge (cmd_chat/).

A Claude Code session can join a room as a first-class member: read/answer humans and other AIs, and — once granted — drive the shared sandbox with full shell + keystroke control. VMs carry a self-describing .hh-agent manifest so work + memory hand off between agents (and humans), and saved VM states are tradeable via a host-global registry.

Operating a room — use the hh-operator skill

To enter/run/watch a room, bridge a Claude session into one, or autonomously monitor and respond, use the hh-operator skill (~/.claude/skills/hh-operator/). It documents the full doctrine: the daemon + hh-bridge CLI, the read→think→act loop, sandbox drive (exec/write/get), the keystroke relay + stop-vocabulary, the watch stop-condition engine, and the .hh-agent manifest for handoffs.

# Run from this repo root; pin the interpreter to the venv.
HH=".venv/bin/python -m cmd_chat.operator"     # = the hh-bridge CLI
$HH up <host> <port> <name> --password <pw> --no-tls   # join (spawns the daemon)
$HH read --wait --timeout 30                            # long-poll for activity
$HH say "…"                                             # chat into the room
$HH keys "make build" enter ; $HH watch --for 'PASS|FAIL' --in screen   # drive
$HH manifest push --root /root --name <vm> --purpose … --objective …    # handoff
$HH spawn "<objective incl. the full join cmd>" --room-host … --go --skip-permissions

Key components

What	Where
Operator bridge (daemon + CLI)	cmd_chat/operator/__main__.py, bridge.py
Agent manifest (hh-agent/v1)	cmd_chat/operator/manifest.py — .hh-agent/ bundle library + CLI
Recursive spawn (Claude-spawns-Claude)	cmd_chat/operator/bootstrap.py (budgeted: --depth/--fanout)
Saved-VM registry / discovery	hh/src/registry.rs → ~/.hh/registry.json; reader: $HH registry list|show
Sandbox grammar (TUI)	/sbx podman|launch, /grant <name>, /sbx save, /sbx browse, /sbx publish, /sbx catalog @user, /sbx pull @user <label>
Server	cmd_chat.py serve <host> <port> --password <pw> [--no-tls]
Rust client	hh/target/debug/hack-house connect <host> <port> <name> --password <pw>

Demo videos — use the video-toolkit

hack-house feature reels are produced with ~/coding/video-toolkit (headless asciinema-in-tmux capture via bin/tmux-demo.py, then a video-forge cut).

• Flagship reel — three Claudes, one shared VM: scenarios/hh-vmhub.json (capture) + scenarios/hh-vmhub-cut.json (forge cut). A planner, builder, and tester (each a real nested claude -p) collaborate to build VMHub — a GitHub-for-VMs web app — live inside one shared sandbox, then save it to the VM library. Role task-scripts: scenarios/vmhub-{builder,tester}-task.sh; staged app under scenarios/assets/vmhub/.
• A reel must show the product: the Rust TUI room (roster, encrypted chat, the shared sandbox F2 view) with Claude visibly operating as a member and Claude-spawning-Claude — not just a console of CLI calls.

Provisioning note: the demo summons a pre-baked localhost/hh-dev:slim (python 3.11) podman sandbox so VMHub (stdlib, zero pip deps) runs with no installs.