Your crew & fleet
Your crew & fleet
Anvil isn't one assistant — it's a crew you delegate to, running across a fleet of machines you steer from one place. This is the map of how it fits together.
Anvil gives you more than a single assistant. You get a crew — specialists work is routed to, and persistent workers that stand by between sessions — running across a fleet of machines you manage together. The pieces have precise names, and it's worth getting them straight, because they do different jobs.
The four ideas
| What it is | |
|---|---|
| Squad | A capability the orchestrator delegates to — "I need security work." You name the need; the host picks the specialist. |
| Agent | The specialist the host resolves from a squad to actually do a delegated task, in its own context. |
| Bot | A persistent worker on a machine's team — a named crew member with a role, a model, and a ceiling it can't exceed. |
| Instance | A machine running Anvil. Connect several to AnvilHub and they become a fleet. |
Read it as a sentence: you keep a crew of bots; the orchestrator routes work by squad; the host runs the right agent; and all of it happens on one or more instances.
How delegation keeps context lean
The reason Anvil can have a large crew without drowning the model is squads: the model sees twelve capability names, not a roster of dozens of agents. It asks for a capability; the host resolves the specialist. That cost stays fixed no matter how many agents you add — and you can add a whole new squad by installing a marketplace package, with no Anvil release.
From one machine to a fleet
A single instance is complete on its own. Pair two or more to AnvilHub and you get a fleet: a view of every machine, the ability to hand a task to whichever one should run it, and a single place where all their work and cost rolls up. Fleet routing is one of the things that only works through AnvilHub — see Instances & the fleet for why.
Seeing it all
Three AnvilHub surfaces turn the crew from something you trust into something you watch:
- Team — the bot board: who's on the crew and what each is doing now.
- Runs — every run across the fleet, with its changeset, outcome and cost.
- Instances — every machine, its status, and where your workspace is pointed.
Where to next
- Squads — how delegation is routed.
- Bots & the Team board — your persistent crew.
- Instances & the fleet — many machines as one.
- Teams & orgs — sharing a crew across people.