Supervisor

The long-running coordinator for channels, sessions, tools, and background services.

The supervisor is the center of the Tars runtime. PM2 runs it as tars-supervisor, and the CLI provides lifecycle and diagnostics around that process.

Responsibilities

• start configured channels and route inbound messages;
• serialize model work against the active session;
• stream engine events back through the originating channel;
• refresh system context after durable fact changes;
• execute due tasks through the same supervised engine;
• coordinate the heartbeat, cron service, and optional dashboard;
• report long-running work without unlocking an operation that is still active.

Concurrency

Tars uses one active agent and session. A supervisor lock prevents overlapping turns from writing inconsistent history. Scheduled work can be deferred while an interactive run is busy.

The heartbeat treats a run longer than ten minutes as diagnostically stale, but never clears its lock while the run is still executing.

Process modes

Production startup requires TARS_SUPERVISOR_MODE=true; tars start sets it through PM2. The terminal chat sets a distinct chat mode and skips daemon-only heartbeat, cron, dashboard, and optionally Discord services so it does not duplicate a background supervisor.