Find specialists with rosters

A roster records who to involve for a purpose and why. The same seat can appear in several rosters with different capabilities and engagement. Membership is a recommendation, not an assignment or a grant of authority. Contact someone with the existing rig send or rig queue commands.

Put JSON files in <workspace.root>/rosters/. Read workspace.root with rig config get workspace.root, or use --folder to read another folder in place.

rig roster list
rig roster show production --json
rig roster find 'colour grading'
rig roster find 'editor@studio' --folder ./rosters --json

list reads authored purposes and curators without contacting daemons. show and find read the configured daemon and registered HTTP hosts through rig ps. Each command reads current node listings once per route, not once per member. find matches part of a capability tag or seat address, ignoring case. A seat in two rosters produces two recommendations with their own reasons.

{
  "version": 1,
  "id": "production",
  "name": "Production",
  "purpose": "Make a film",
  "curator": { "seat": "lead@studio", "host": "host-a" },
  "updated_at": "2026-10-01",
  "members": [{
    "seat": "editor@studio",
    "host": "host-a",
    "capabilities": ["colour grading"],
    "engagement": ["consult", "review"],
    "use_when": "Choose a look or review a grade",
    "why": "Knows the footage and the delivery requirements",
    "caveat": "Ask about availability first"
  }]
}

Use the serving daemon's hostSelfId and the exact seat address from rig ps --nodes -A --json. A caller's local host alias is not necessarily that identity. Other hosts must already be registered; the roster command does not register them or dispatch work. Existing HTTP fan-out reports SSH-only hosts as unsupported. JSON retains per-host failures and partial-read warnings.

Authored files contain recommendations, not runtime facts. Extra fields are ignored, including any authored runtime, model or activity. At read time the command joins by exact host self-id and seat. Unmatched or conflicting observations are unknown; a seat not reported running is stale, with current runtime/model unknown. The configured model is the registry declaration. The observed native model remains unknown: these commands do not open native histories or verify what model the provider is running. Activity includes its sample time when the daemon supplies it; activity and running status do not promise that someone is available for new work.

The JSON observations.readAt is when the inventory read completed, not a native observation timestamp. Rosters are never rewritten by these commands. Malformed files produce warnings while valid rosters remain usable; duplicate IDs make show report ambiguity instead of selecting one. Non-regular file targets, such as FIFOs and directories, are skipped with a warning; links to regular files remain readable. Inventory uses ps --no-cleanup to preserve even stale local daemon state files. Ordinary rig ps keeps its existing cleanup behavior unless given that flag.