Fourth Sharpen the Saw update. Last time I was deep in agentrail-rs, building the ICRL dual-memory engine. This week shifted gears: two Emacs integration packages for existing CLI tools, and a brand-new multi-agent Program Manager called All Together Now (ATN) that orchestrates agents running agentrail-rs workflows. ATN went from empty repo to working web dashboard in a single session.

The theme this week is making tools talk to each other—Emacs talking to CLI tools, agents talking to agents through agentrail-rs, and a Program Manager keeping the whole orchestra in sync. Next up: bringing Emacs into the ATN loop as a first-class frontend for the orchestrator.

Why Sharpen the Saw? — The name comes from Covey’s Habit 7: stop cutting long enough to sharpen the blade. This series is the weekly checkpoint where I step back from feature work and invest in the tools themselves—smoother editor integration, better agent coordination, less friction between the moving parts. Four weeks in, the compound interest is showing.

Resource Link
pjmai-rs sw-cli-tools/pjmai-rs
reg-rs sw-cli-tools/reg-rs
All Together Now sw-vibe-coding/all-together-now
Prior Post Saw (3/?): agentrail-rs — From Walking Skeleton to Dual Memory
Comments Discord

Emacs Meets the CLI: pjmai-rs

pjmai-rs is a project manager that maintains a stack-based navigation history, groups, and per-project metadata. It works well from the terminal, but Emacs shell-mode has a blind spot: when the CLI changes directories via exit-code signaling, Emacs doesn’t update default-directory. File completion breaks. Dired opens the wrong place.

The new pjmai.el package (376 lines) solves this by calling the binary directly from Elisp and managing per-project shell buffers where default-directory is correct from the start.

What It Does

Everything lives under the C-c p prefix:

Key Action
C-c p c Change project (opens/switches shell)
C-c p l List projects
C-c p s Show current project
C-c p p Push to stack and switch
C-c p o Pop from stack
C-c p d Open project in dired
C-c p a Add project
C-c p e Edit project metadata
C-c p g Group commands (list, show, prompt)

Each project gets a dedicated shell buffer (*pjmai:projectname*) with the correct working directory set before the shell spawns. Tab completion just works. The shell function is pluggable—#'shell by default, but #'vterm or #'eshell are configurable.

25 ERT tests cover the CLI interface, JSON parsing, project completion, shell buffer management, and keymap structure.

Emacs Meets the CLI: reg-rs

reg-rs is a regression testing tool that captures command output and diffs against baselines. Like pjmai-rs, it had great terminal ergonomics but required context-switching away from Emacs.

my-reg-rs.el (208 lines) puts regression testing under C-c r:

Key Action
C-c r r Run all tests
C-c r v Run verbose
C-c r l List tests
C-c r s Show test details
C-c r u Update/accept baselines
C-c r a Add new test
C-c r R Rerun last command

Output goes to compilation-mode buffers, so next-error navigation works naturally. The package auto-detects the project root by checking for work/reg-rs/, .rgt/.tdb files, or falling back to project.el.

All Together Now: A Multi-Agent Program Manager

The bigger project this week. I’ve been running multiple Claude Code instances across repos and the coordination overhead was becoming the bottleneck—switching tabs, manually checking wikis, copying context between agents. All Together Now (ATN) is a Program Manager that owns the agent terminals and provides a unified control plane.

The Architecture

ATN runs as an Axum HTTP server that spawns N agents via portable-pty, streams their terminal output through SSE to a browser dashboard, and maintains a shared wiki for coordination state.

All Together Now architecture: Browser Dashboard connects via SSE and REST to an Axum Server with PTY Manager and Wiki Store, which manages Agents and Wiki Files

Four Phases in One Session

Phase What Tests
0+1 PTY session management—spawn, read/write, Ctrl-C, transcripts 5 integration tests
2 Minimal web UI—SSE streaming, xterm.js terminal widget Working end-to-end
3 Multi-agent dashboard—N agents, per-agent state machine, responsive grid 3-agent demo (alice, bob, carol)
4 Wiki integration—REST CRUD, ETag-based CAS, seeded coordination pages 8 unit tests

29 tests pass across the workspace. Zero clippy warnings.

The Six Crates

Crate Lines Role
atn-core ~300 Domain types: AgentConfig, AgentState, events, routing
atn-pty ~500 PTY sessions, serialized writer queues, state tracker
atn-server ~270 Axum HTTP/SSE server, static UI
atn-ui ~200 Yew WASM components (dashboard, wiki browser)
atn-wiki ~300 File-backed wiki with CAS from wiki-rs
atn-trail ~200 Agentrail integration for workflow tracking

Why PTY Ownership Matters

The key insight: if the Program Manager owns the pseudo-terminals, it can:

  1. Stream output to a web dashboard without agents knowing
  2. Inject commands into agent sessions (serialized, no interleaving)
  3. Detect state by parsing output (prompt markers, idle timeouts, question detection)
  4. Log transcripts for debugging and replay

The serialized writer queue per agent prevents input corruption when multiple sources (human, coordinator, macros) write to the same terminal.

Wiki as Coordination Layer

ATN seeds five coordination pages on startup:

Page Purpose
Coordination/Goals Team objectives
Coordination/Agents Who is doing what (auto-updated)
Coordination/Requests Inter-agent feature/bug requests
Coordination/Blockers Dependency tracking
Coordination/Log Append-only event timeline

The wiki uses ETag-based Compare-and-Swap from the wiki-rs project, so concurrent agent writes get conflict detection instead of silent data loss.

What’s Next

ATN Phase 5: Message routing—agents write JSON to an outbox, the PGM routes push events to the correct target agent or escalates to human review.

Emacs packages: Phase 2 additions—transient menus for discoverability, completion annotations showing project paths and languages.

Emacs as ATN frontend: The pjmai-rs and reg-rs Emacs packages prove the pattern—call a Rust binary from Elisp, parse structured output, manage buffers. The same approach will give Emacs users a native ATN interface: agent status, wiki edits, and command injection without leaving the editor.

Tying it together: ATN + agentrail-rs integration, where each agent’s workflow progress is visible in the dashboard (and eventually in Emacs) and skills/experiences flow between sessions.

Better tools, better integration. Follow for more Sharpen the Saw updates.