Minion Orchestrator

Contract

Minions is a Postgres-native job queue for durable, observable background work. This single skill handles two lanes:

• Deterministic shell jobs (gbrain jobs submit shell ...)
• LLM subagent jobs (gbrain agent run ...)

When to route to Minions: durable, observable work that must survive restarts, fan out across many parallel tasks, or persist across sessions. Routing policy is defined in skills/conventions/subagent-routing.md — the project default is pain_triggered (native subagents first, Minions after specific pain signals fire); Mode A (all-through-Minions) is opt-in.

Guarantees:

• Jobs survive gateway restart (Postgres-backed)
• Every job has structured progress, token accounting, and session transcripts
• Running agents can be steered mid-flight via inbox messages
• Jobs can be paused, resumed, or cancelled at any time
• Parent-child DAGs with configurable failure policies

Durable-execution doctrine (routing convention the agent follows — nothing mechanically enforces it; see "Durable execution" below):

• Operations expected to exceed ~2 minutes route through the capability ladder, never a bare background shell that dies with the…