The Fellowship's Agents

Palantir

Background Monitor

A thin reporter over the CLI's health sweep during fellowship execution — runs fellowship health and reports its stalled, zombie, and struggling classification rather than recomputing it. Reads each quest's history for scope drift (files touched outside the described scope) and file conflicts between parallel quests. Reports issues to Gandalf for intervention.

Enabled by default. Spawns at 2+ active quests. Uses the haiku model by default (configurable via models.palantir). Configure via palantir.enabled and palantir.minQuests in settings. Below the threshold, or with palantir disabled, Gandalf runs the same health sweep itself — monitoring never depends on the extra agent.

Balrog

Adversarial Validator

Attacks the implementation before anything else reviews it. Analyzes the quest diff for failure modes, writes targeted test cases using the project's existing test framework, runs them, and delivers a severity-ranked findings report. Critical and High findings must be fixed before the quest opens its PR.

Spawned by quest as the first step of its Review phase. No gates, no commits — findings only.

Scout

Research Agent

Autonomous research agent for questions that need investigation but not code changes. Explores the codebase, reads documentation, and optionally spawns a fresh adversarial validator subagent to verify findings. Produces structured reports with confidence levels.

Spawned via scout: <question> in fellowship descriptions. No gates, no hooks, no commits. Uses the sonnet model by default (configurable via models.scout).

Validator

Findings Verifier

Read-only adversarial verifier spawned by scout during its Validate phase. Re-reads every referenced file and line range, challenges assumptions, and reports each claim as CONFIRMED, CONTESTED, or UNVERIFIED.

Tools restricted to Read, Glob, and Grep — cannot modify files or run commands. Uses the sonnet model by default (configurable via models.validator).

How They Work Together

You
task descriptions, gate approvals
Palantir
alerts (stuck, drift, conflicts)
Gandalf Coordinator
Quests
spawn with task gate submissions, status updates
Balrog
spawn pre-review findings report
Scouts
spawn with question research findings