Skip to main content
Spawn Mode is a Mac-only batch launcher for interactive agent CLIs. A Spawn button in the Code sidebar opens a grid of agent terminal tiles — pick a total count and an agent mix, and Continuum opens that many CLIs at once, all running in your selected project. Every tile is a real PTY you type into directly, exactly as if you ran claude, codex, or cursor-agent in a terminal yourself. Unlike managed sessions, spawn tiles are plain interactive CLIs: Continuum launches each agent’s TUI with no permission-skip flags. You drive the agent in its own interface; Continuum just hosts the terminals in a grid and keeps them alive across tab switches.
Spawn Mode is Mac-only. Spawn groups are ephemeral — they die with the app and are never persisted to disk or paired to iPhone or Watch. Use managed sessions when you want a session that survives a relaunch and is reachable from mobile.

​
Opening a spawn

The Spawn button sits in the Code sidebar between search and the Projects list. It has two click targets:
  • Click the row body to spawn the default grid immediately — the session count and agent from Settings → Spawn, falling back to the first installed agent.
  • Click the + to open the config sheet and choose the count and agent mix.
You must have a project selected in the Code sidebar first. Every tile opens in that project’s directory (the active workspace, or the selected repo) — the spawn fails closed rather than silently falling back to your home folder if no project is selected. The button’s tooltip and the config sheet both name the directory the spawn will run in.

​
The config sheet

1

Pick a session count

Choose 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8 total terminals. The default selection comes from your Settings → Spawn preference.
2

Set the agent mix

Each provider has a − / + stepper. The header shows how many of your chosen total are still unallocated; the Spawn button stays disabled until every slot is assigned. A fresh sheet seeds the whole batch onto your default agent (Claude when installed), so “just spawn 4 Claude” is a two-click flow.When the batch is already full, pressing + on a second agent auto-debits a slot from the default agent instead of being a dead button — so “make one of these a Codex” is one click.
3

Spawn

The button reads Spawn N sessions. Tiles launch most-allocated-first, the new group is selected in the Code tab, and the grid takes over the center pane.
The six selectable agents are Claude, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok. Each row shows the provider glyph and dot color, and a stepper when the CLI is installed.

​
Missing or disabled CLIs

A provider is spawnable only when its CLI is on disk and the provider is enabled in Settings → Providers (the same gate Continuum’s managed-spawn path enforces). The row tells you which is missing:
  • CLI not found on PATH — the binary isn’t installed. An Install… button opens an embedded terminal running the official install command for that CLI (the same setup flow onboarding uses). You sign in on the CLI’s own first run inside the spawn tile. When you close the install terminal, the sheet re-probes availability live, so a just-installed CLI flips its row without reopening.
  • Disabled in Settings → Providers — installed but turned off. Enable it in Providers and reopen the sheet.
OpenCode resolves your real opencode install — the official installer location (~/.opencode/bin), Homebrew, or your login-shell PATH — and deliberately ignores the app-bundled opencode serve helper that backs the OpenCode chat/usage harness. That bundled binary isn’t an interactive TUI; launched as one it renders nothing and exits, so the sheet shows Install opencode instead of spawning a dead tile.

​
The grid

An open spawn group fills the entire center pane — the right-hand review pane stays collapsed while a grid is showing. The grid shape follows the tile count: One tile is the typing target at any time: it carries a provider-colored selection border (the heritage terra-cotta for Claude, graphite for Codex, blue for Gemini, and so on — color always travels with the tile’s glyph, never color alone) and owns the keyboard. Click into a terminal, or tap a tile’s header, to move focus to it. Each tile header carries the agent glyph, the tile’s label (Claude 1, Codex 2, OpenCode Go 1 — numbered per agent kind), and two controls:
  • Expand — blows the tile up to fill the whole pane; the header gains a Back to grid button to compact it. Expanding never tears the terminal down: parked tiles are moved offscreen at their normal size rather than resized or removed, so no scrollback is lost and no in-progress TUI frame is garbled.
  • End this terminal (×) — kills that one agent. If a tile exits on its own, it stays visible with an exited badge so you can read the final output.
Spawn terminals are fully scrollable with native ANSI colors, and Continuum keeps each PTY’s window size in lockstep with the laid-out tile so the agent’s TUI never renders clipped.

​
Resizing a group

The grid header has a 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 size toggle. The current size is highlighted and inert; the others behave by direction:
  • A larger size grows this spawn in place — new cells fill with the group’s dominant (largest-count) agent. No confirmation, because nothing is killed.
  • A smaller size opens a new spawn at that count, preserving the mix scaled down. Clicking a lower number never kills your live agents — it starts a fresh batch instead.

​
Refilling a closed tile

Closing a single tile leaves an empty Start New Session cell (the grid keeps it as a one-click refill rather than instantly reflowing). Click it to spawn a new tile; in a mixed group it’s a menu so you pick which agent kind to refill with. Numbering continues past the highest live index for that kind, so a refilled slot never collides with a still-running tile’s title. Once the survivors fit a smaller canonical layout, the grid compacts so live terminals reclaim the pane.

​
The Spawns sidebar section

Open spawn groups list in a Spawns section above Projects in the Code sidebar. Each row shows the group name (default Spawn 1, Spawn 2, …), a most-to-least agent subtitle (4 Claude · 2 Codex), and a live tile count badge. Clicking a row reopens that group’s grid in the center pane. Right-click a group for:
  • Rename… — give the batch a memorable name. The rename lives only in memory (groups are ephemeral), so there’s nothing to persist.
  • Close spawn — end every terminal in the group.
The Spawn button itself can be hidden from Settings → Spawn; any already-open spawns keep rendering and running regardless, so hiding the button never strands a live batch.

​
Closing and quitting

Closing a group ends every terminal in it. When any tile is still live, both close paths — the grid header’s Close spawn and the sidebar’s context-menu Close spawn — show a confirmation first (“Every terminal in this spawn ends immediately. Sessions are not recoverable.”); an all-exited group closes with no prompt. Teardown kills the agent processes one at a time on a background task so eight simultaneous kills can’t pin the app.
Spawn agents are killed when Continuum quits. On Cmd+Q, Continuum synchronously signals each live spawn child’s process group (HUP, then TERM, then KILL) so an agent that ignores the terminal’s hangup doesn’t outlive the app and keep burning your quota. Because spawn groups are never persisted, quitting Continuum ends every spawn — there is nothing to restore on the next launch.

​
Settings → Spawn

The Spawn settings tab controls the defaults:
  • Show Spawn button — show or hide the button in the Code sidebar.
  • Default session count — pre-selected count (1 / 2 / 4 / 6 / 8) when you open a new spawn.
  • Default agent — pre-selected agent seeded into a fresh allocation; falls back to the first installed agent if your choice isn’t available.

​
Spawn Mode vs. managed sessions

Reach for Spawn Mode when you want to fan a single project out to several agents at once and steer each one by hand. Reach for a managed session when you want chat, plan/approve, diff and PR review, or mobile access.
  • Sessions — managed, persisted sessions with the New Session sheet and worktrees.
  • Code — the Code workspace, sidebar, and review panes.
  • Providers — installing and enabling each agent CLI.
  • Composer — the chat composer used by managed sessions (not by spawn tiles).