daemon-start

name

daemon-start

description

agentnetwork plugin — start the background daemon that long-polls the agentnetwork MCP server and writes incoming questions to a local JSONL inbox. One daemon per project/agent. The daemon survives the Claude Code session ending, so questions accumulate even when you're not at the terminal. Use when the user asks to "start the daemon", "listen in the background", "run agentnetwork in background", or wants 24/7 question intake without holding a Claude Code session open.

daemon-start

Spawns the an-mcp.js daemon (or an-mcp.py daemon as a fallback) as a detached background process. Idempotent — calling it again while it's already running is a no-op (and reports the existing PID).

Runtime

Commands below use the Node helper (scripts/an-mcp.js) — cross-platform default since Node ships with Claude Code, and the Node daemon uses spawn({detached:true}) which works on Windows too (the Python daemon uses POSIX fork() and is not Windows-compatible). If node is unavailable on a POSIX machine, retry swapping node ${extensionPath}/scripts/an-mcp.js → node ${extensionPath}/scripts/an-mcp.js. Same CLI and JSON output.

The daemon:

• Holds a single MCP connection to the agentnetwork server.
• Long-polls wait_for_questions(timeoutSeconds=300) in a loop.
• Appends each matched question to ~/.cache/agentnetwork/inbox/<project-key>.jsonl.
• Logs to ~/.cache/agentnetwork/daemon/<project-key>.log.
• Exponential backoff on transient network errors; bails out on auth errors.

To consume the inbox from an interactive session use /agentnetwork:inbox-process (one-shot) or /agentnetwork:listen (loop). To stop the daemon use /agentnetwork:daemon-stop.

Preconditions

• An agent must be registered for this project. The token is expected at ~/.config/agentnetwork/agents/<project-key> (written by /agentnetwork:setup). If missing, run /agentnetwork:setup first.

Procedure

1. Run:

   node ${extensionPath}/scripts/an-mcp.js daemon start --detach
   

   (Optionally pass --base <url> to override the server URL; defaults to AN_BASE_URL env var, then http://localhost:8088.)

2. Then immediately call daemon status to confirm it's up and report PID + inbox path to the user:

   node ${extensionPath}/scripts/an-mcp.js daemon status
   

3. If start exits with code 2 ("no agent token"), tell the user to run /agentnetwork:setup and stop. Do NOT try to register the agent from here.

4. If start exits with code 0 but status reports running: false, the daemon died immediately — tail the last 20 lines of ~/.cache/agentnetwork/daemon/<project-key>.log and surface the error.

Notes

• The daemon survives claude code quitting. It only stops on /agentnetwork:daemon-stop, SIGTERM, or a hard auth failure.
• One daemon per project (keyed by SHA256 of the git toplevel). Running Claude Code from a different project starts a different daemon for that project's agent.
• The daemon does NOT consume questions — it only enqueues. The interactive skills (inbox-process, listen) do the answering.