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+---
+openprd: "0.3"
+id: "0017"
+title: "Put the herd on the Omarchy bar — a plugin, and the one snapshot it reads"
+status: Draft
+authors:
+  - anthony@profullstack.com
+created: 2026-09-22
+updated: 2026-09-22
+repo: https://github.com/moshcoder/moshcode
+discussion:
+implementation: src/omarchy.mjs (new), src/cli-schema.mjs, moshcoder/omarchy-moshcode (new repo)
+tags:
+  - omarchy
+  - herd
+  - fleet
+  - cost
+  - plugin
+supersedes:
+superseded-by:
+---
+
+## Problem
+
+Everything moshcode knows about a running fleet is behind a prompt. `moshcode ps` says which agents are alive, `moshcode cost --all` says what they are burning, `moshcode fleet tree` says who started whom. All three are true and none of them are on screen. You learn what your machine is doing by deciding to ask.
+
+That gap has already cost real money and real hours. On 2026-09-13 the burn turned out to be a dozen parallel background jobs running at roughly $131/hour at list, which nobody saw until someone typed `moshcode cost`. The cheaper and more common version is an agent in `blocked` state: it asked a question twenty minutes ago, it is holding a pane and a context window, and the only evidence is a line of text in a session nobody is looking at. A number that is only true when you ask for it is not a status; it is a lookup.
+
+Omarchy ships a Quickshell bar with a documented third-party plugin surface (`plugins.omarchy.org/develop.html`): a `bar-widget` is a QML item that lives in the active bar, a `panel` is a floating surface it can summon, both installed from a git URL into `~/.config/omarchy/plugins/{id}` and both reloaded on rescan. That is exactly the shape of the missing surface: one persistent glyph that is always visible, and a list you open when the glyph says something changed. The marketplace currently lists zero community plugins, so a small well-behaved one lands in an empty room.
+
+There is a cost to getting it wrong. Omarchy plugins run **unsandboxed, inside a shared long-running shell process, with the user's permissions**, and the documentation is blunt about it: "Review every dependency and command, avoid unnecessary privileges, and never start a second Quickshell process for a plugin." A widget that leaks a process per tick or throws on a parse error does not break moshcode, it breaks the whole bar for everyone who installed it. That constraint, not the QML, is what shapes this PRD.
+
+## Goals
+
+- The state of the herd — how many agents are running, waiting, blocked, and what the last hour cost — is on screen without anyone asking for it.
+- A blocked agent is noticed in seconds, because the thing that changed is the one glyph that is always visible.
+- moshcode stays the only source of truth. The plugin renders a snapshot the CLI produced; it never computes fleet state itself, and it never becomes a second control plane.
+- One cheap read. The bar polls a single command, one process at a time, bounded and read-only, with a budget small enough that a 1 second poll is not a tax.
+- Installable by a stranger in one command, listed in the Omarchy marketplace, and removable without leaving anything behind.
+- Honest when it cannot know. No moshcode, a stale snapshot, or an engine that prices nothing all read as themselves, never as zero.
+
+## Non-Goals
+
+- A control plane on the bar. Starting agents, writing prompts, and answering a blocked question stay in the terminal, the TUI, and `moshcode herd`.
+- Replacing `moshcode herd bar` (the tmux row under a session) or the TUI. This is a third surface for a different moment: you are not in moshcode, and you want to know whether you should be.
+- Ports to Waybar, Ironbar, GNOME, or anything else in 0.1. One bar, done properly.
+- A daemon, a socket, or a network. The plugin spawns the CLI and reads stdout.
+- Support for the `bar`, `overlay`, `menu` or `service` kinds. `bar-widget` plus `panel` is the whole surface for 0.1 (`service` is revisited under Open Questions).
+- Changing what moshcode already records. This reads `ps`, `cost` and `fleet tree`; it does not add fields to the herd manifest or to OpenFleet (PRD 0016).
+
+## Users
+
+- The operator running several agents at once on an Omarchy box, who currently learns the fleet state by typing and therefore learns it late.
+- The moshcode user on Omarchy who never opens the TUI, and for whom the bar is the only moshcode surface they will see all day.
+- An Omarchy user with no moshcode installed, who sees the listing and needs the plugin to say so plainly rather than render an empty bar item.
+
+## Requirements
+
+- R1 [P0] `moshcode omarchy status --json` is the only thing the plugin runs. One process, no shell, no arguments the plugin composes from user data. It prints one object: `schema` (integer, 1), `generatedAt` (ISO 8601), `moshcode` (version), `agents` (the `ps --json` rows, already carrying `name`, `engine`, `state`, `fleet`, `swarm`, `approvals`, `cwd`, `ageMs`, `alive`, `attached`), `counts` (`running`, `waiting`, `blocked`, `gone`), `burn` (the `1m`, `15m`, `1h` windows from `cost --json` with `cost`, `perHour`, `runs`, `engines`, `unpriced`), `fleets` (the `fleet tree --json` roots, one level deep), and `alerts` (zero or more `{ kind, subject, since }`). It exits 0 with a populated object or exits 0 with `{ schema, generatedAt, error }`; it never writes to the herd, the ledger, or the fleet.
+- R2 [P0] The snapshot is bounded. `ps --json`, `cost --all --since 1h --json` and `fleet tree --json` each return in about 210ms today on the dev box, which is process boot rather than work; `omarchy status` does all three in one boot and caches the cost half for `--ttl` (default 5s) under `~/.moshcode/omarchy-status.json` (0600), so a 1s poll re-reads a file and a 5s poll recomputes. A single run that exceeds 2s returns what it has with the slow section marked `partial: true` rather than blocking the bar.
+- R3 [P0] The plugin lives in its own public repository, `moshcoder/omarchy-moshcode`, because `omarchy plugin add {git-url}` clones a repo into `~/.config/omarchy/plugins/{id}` and validation requires `manifest.json` at the repository root. Contents: `manifest.json`, `BarWidget.qml`, `Panel.qml`, `Model.js`, `preview.png`, `README.md`, `LICENSE` (MIT), and no symlinks anywhere, which the CLI validator rejects.
+- R4 [P0] The manifest is `schemaVersion: 1`, `id: "sh.moshcode.herd"` (namespaced, and not under the reserved `omarchy.*` prefix), `name: "Moshcode Herd"`, `version` semver, `author`, `license: "MIT"`, `description`, `kinds: ["bar-widget", "panel"]`, `entryPoints: { "barWidget": "BarWidget.qml", "panel": "Panel.qml" }`, and a `barWidget` block with `displayName`, `category: "System"`, `allowMultiple: false`, `defaultSection: "right"`. `BarWidget.qml` and `Panel.qml` share one `moduleName`, which is required for the widget to load the panel through a `Loader`.
+- R5 [P0] The widget is one line and it is theme-driven: agent count, a state glyph, and `$/h` from the `1h` window when it is above a configurable floor (default $1/hour, so an idle machine shows no money). Colors come from `root.barForeground` and the shell's theme properties and the font from `root.bar.fontFamily`. No hard-coded color, no hard-coded font, no icon that only reads on a dark theme.
+- R6 [P0] The panel is a list, not a dashboard: one row per agent (name, engine, state, fleet/swarm, age, cwd tail, and a marker when `approvals` is `bypass`), then the three burn windows with cost and cost per hour, then the snapshot's age. It exposes `open()`, `close()`, `toggle()`, the `opened` and `popoutSwitchClosing` properties the shell expects, anchors with `KeyboardPanel`, and handles Escape and Tab through `PanelKeyCatcher`.
+- R7 [P0] Polling is one `Process` at a time, started on a timer, never overlapping: 5s while the panel is closed, 1s while it is open, and a back-off to 30s after three consecutive failures, recovering on the first success. No `sh -c`, no string interpolation into a command line, no second Quickshell process, and every parse wrapped so that malformed JSON renders as "unavailable" instead of throwing into the shared shell.
+- R8 [P0] The plugin is read-only in 0.1. The only state it changes is its own panel through `summon`/`hide`. It never starts, stops, kills, or attaches anything.
+- R9 [P0] It degrades honestly. No `moshcode` on PATH reads "moshcode not installed" with an install hint in the panel, not zeros. A snapshot older than three poll intervals dims the widget and shows its timestamp. Engines that log nothing priceable (gemini, kimi, deepseek, openagents) are carried through from `cost`'s `unpriced` and named in the panel, so an unpriced fleet never renders as free. A moshcode too old to have `omarchy status` reads "moshcode 0.x is too old" with the version it needs.
+- R10 [P0] Blocked is the alert. Any agent in `blocked` state — a question, not a finish — puts the widget into its attention state (theme accent, blocked count first) and raises an `alerts` entry with the subject and how long it has been waiting. This is the single behaviour the whole plugin exists for; everything else is context around it.
+- R11 [P0] `moshcode omarchy validate [dir]` reproduces the documented CLI checks in JavaScript, so the plugin can be verified on a box with no Omarchy installed: manifest parses as JSON, the seven required fields are present, every declared kind has its matching entry point key, every referenced file exists as a safe relative path inside the plugin directory, there are no symlinks, and the id is not in the `omarchy.*` namespace. It runs in the plugin repository's CI on every push, and it is not a claim that the plugin works — only that the listing will validate.
+- R12 [P1] `moshcode omarchy install [--link]` clones or symlinks the plugin into `~/.config/omarchy/plugins/sh.moshcode.herd` and runs `omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins`; `--link` is the development path and is refused when the target is not a moshcode checkout. `moshcode omarchy doctor` reports what is present: `omarchy`, `omarchy-shell`, `qmllint`, `$OMARCHY_PATH/shell`, the plugin directory, and the installed plugin version against the CLI's.
+- R13 [P0] Before submission the plugin is verified on a real Omarchy install, not on the dev box: `omarchy plugin validate "$PLUGIN_DIR"` clean, `qmllint -I "$OMARCHY_PATH/shell"` clean on both QML files, the widget renders in all three sections (`omarchy bar move sh.moshcode.herd --section left|center|right`), the panel opens and closes from the keyboard, the shell survives a restart and a `rescanPlugins` with the plugin loaded, and `omarchy plugin remove sh.moshcode.herd` leaves nothing behind. A sustained run is watched for leaked processes: with the panel open for an hour, the process count at the end equals the count at the start.
+- R14 [P0] Listing: submit through the marketplace's GitHub issue template at `omacom/omarchy-plugin-marketplace` (repository link, category, tags), after the automated validation passes on the submitted commit. The listing carries the name, author, description and `preview.png` from the manifest and the repo, so those are written for a stranger reading a card, not for us.
+- R15 [P0] Launch is part of shipping, not after it: once the listing is live, the house announcement flow runs (socials, blog, ads) and the plugin's README links back to moshcode's install path.
+- R16 [P1] The contract is versioned in both directions. `status --json` carries `schema`, and the plugin renders any `schema` it knows and says "unsupported snapshot" for anything newer rather than misreading fields. The manifest's README states the minimum moshcode version, and `omarchy doctor` compares it.
+- R17 [P2] Panel actions, behind an explicit confirm step each: attach a session (spawn the terminal on `moshcode herd attach <name>`) and stop a swarm (`moshcode fleet stop <swarm>`). Deliberately deferred: every one of these is a write from an unsandboxed process, and the read-only version has to be boring in the wild first.
+
+## UX Notes
+
+Four states, one glyph. **Idle**: dimmed, the agent count, no money. **Busy**: normal foreground, count plus `$/h` once the floor is passed. **Blocked**: the theme's accent, blocked count first, and it stays that way until the question is answered. **Unavailable**: dimmed with a dot, and the reason in the panel rather than a tooltip nobody hovers.
+
+The panel opens on click and on the shell's keyboard route, and closes on Escape. It is a dense list because the point is to scan it in two seconds and then either go to a terminal or forget about it. Nothing animates. The numbers in it are the same numbers `moshcode ps` and `moshcode cost` print, in the same order, with the same names, so nobody has to learn a second vocabulary for the same fleet.
+
+Default section is `right`, with the clock and the system indicators, because this is a status, not content. It is allowed anywhere, and `allowMultiple` is false since a second copy would poll a second time for the same answer.
+
+## Success Metrics
+
+- Time from an agent entering `blocked` to a human noticing, measured by the gap between the ledger's block and the next input to that session. Target: minutes, from the current "until someone happens to look".
+- `moshcode ps` and `moshcode cost` typed by hand on an Omarchy box drop, because the answer is already on screen.
+- Zero shell crashes or restarts attributable to the plugin, measured over the first month of daily use. A bar that falls over once will be uninstalled and never reinstalled.
+- The snapshot stays under its budget: p95 of `moshcode omarchy status --json` under 400ms on a machine with a month of transcripts.
+- Listed in the marketplace, with installs and stars as a secondary read on whether any of this generalises beyond one user.
+
+## Risks & Open Questions
+
+- **Nothing here can be tested on this box.** The dev machine is Ubuntu 26.04 and has no `omarchy`, `omarchy-shell`, `quickshell` or `qmllint` on PATH. The CLI half (R1, R2, R11) is testable locally; every QML requirement and all of R13 needs a real Omarchy install. Decide early whether that is a VM, a spare machine, or a borrowed one, because it gates the entire plugin half.
+- **Unsandboxed, shared process.** The blast radius of a bug is the user's whole bar, not our widget. Mitigation is the shape of R7 and R9: one process, no shell, guarded parses, and no writes. It should still be reviewed as if it were a daemon, because it effectively is one.
+- **A very young contract.** The marketplace lists zero community plugins and the manifest is at `schemaVersion: 1`. Fields, validation, and the CLI verbs may move under us. Re-run `omarchy plugin validate` against the current Omarchy release before every plugin release, and keep the QML small enough that a breaking change is an afternoon.
+- **The cost half may not stay cheap.** `moshcode cost` reads transcripts, and 210ms on this machine is not a promise about a machine with a year of them. R2's cache and `partial` flag are the hedge; if they are not enough, the burn windows need an index rather than a scan, which is a separate piece of work in `src/cost.mjs`.
+- **Repo split needs confirming.** The root-manifest requirement points at a separate `moshcoder/omarchy-moshcode` repository, which means a second release to keep in step. The alternative — a subdirectory here, mirrored out on release — keeps one repo but adds a publish step that can silently lag. Recommendation is the separate repo; it wants an explicit yes.
+- **Process spawning from QML is assumed, not verified.** Quickshell's `Process`/`Io` types are referenced by Omarchy's shell reference rather than demonstrated in the plugin guide. Confirm on a real box that argv-style spawning without a shell is available to a third-party plugin before committing to R1's design; if it is not, the fallback is the CLI writing a snapshot file on a timer and the plugin only reading it, which is strictly worse but workable.
+- **Does this also want a `service`?** A `service` plugin is a headless singleton, which is the right kind for raising a notification when an agent blocks while no bar widget is placed. It is out of scope here on purpose, but if the blocked alert is the reason the plugin exists, a widget-only delivery may be the wrong half of the feature.
+- **Naming.** `moshcode plugin` already means Claude Code plugins and their marketplace, so this takes the `moshcode omarchy` namespace to avoid teaching one word two meanings. If a second desktop bar ever lands, that verb is wrong and becomes `moshcode bar`.
diff --git a/prd/README.md b/prd/README.md
index c724bf62..04b2ec5e 100644
--- a/prd/README.md
+++ b/prd/README.md
@@ -32,4 +32,5 @@ Start one with `moshcode prd "<idea>"` (TUI: `/prd`).
 | [0014](0014-remote-mcp-session-gateway.md) | Expose live Moshcode sessions over remote MCP | Draft |
 | [0015](0015-swarm-one-task-a-herd-of-agents.md) | Swarm — one task, a herd of agents, one answer | Draft |
 | [0016](0016-openfleet-the-record-a-swarm-leaves-behind.md) | OpenFleet: the record a swarm leaves behind, and the fleet verb that reads it | Draft |
+| [0017](0017-moshcode-on-the-omarchy-bar.md) | Put the herd on the Omarchy bar — a plugin, and the one snapshot it reads | Draft |
 <!-- PRD-INDEX:END -->