Workarea

rensei host workarea gives you a CLI window into the local workarea pool - the set of pre-cloned, toolchain-installed repository snapshots the daemon keeps ready for fast agent dispatch.

Workarea management is implemented in the open-source donmai runtime. The canonical command reference, pool architecture, pool member lifecycle, and restore workflow are documented at donmai.dev/docs/cli/workarea. This page orients you to the Rensei context and the rensei host workarea surface.

What is a Workarea?

When the daemon claims a session, it picks a ready pool member (a warm workarea), hands it to the spawned agent, and marks it acquired. After the session ends the workarea is either:

Archived - the agent's file system snapshot is preserved as a workarea for inspection, restore, or diff.
Recycled - returned to the pool in a warmed state if the post-session state is clean.

Archived workareas are what rensei host workarea list shows.

Commands

These commands are implemented in the donmai OSS layer. All flags, output format, and exact behavior are documented at donmai.dev/docs/cli/workarea.

List Workareas

rensei host workarea list
rensei host workarea list --json
rensei host workarea list --project my-project-slug

list returns active pool members and on-disk archives together, each row carrying its state; there is no status filter flag. --project limits results to workareas for a specific project. Narrow by state with jq:

rensei host workarea list --json | jq '[.[] | select(.state == "warm")]'

Inspect a Workarea

rensei host workarea show <id>

Shows the workarea's full metadata: session ID, repository, toolchain key, disk usage, timestamps, and current status.

Restore a Workarea

rensei host workarea restore <archive-id> [--into-session-id <session-id>] [--reason "<why>"]

Materialises an archive back into a new active workarea on this host so you can inspect, replay, or debug the agent's file system state at session end. It does not copy to an arbitrary path: pass --into-session-id to pin the restored workarea to a session, and --reason to record why in the audit log.

Diff Two Workareas

rensei host workarea diff <archive-a> <archive-b>

Shows a unified diff between two session workareas - useful for comparing an agent's output across runs.

Daemon Address

All rensei host workarea subcommands talk to the local daemon HTTP API on 127.0.0.1:7734. If you run the daemon on a non-default port, set RENSEI_DAEMON_URL:

RENSEI_DAEMON_URL=http://127.0.0.1:9000 rensei host workarea list

Removed Top-level Alias

As of v0.9.0, the top-level rensei workarea alias is gone, not deprecated - it was hidden and unversioned since the 2026-05-06 rename and outlived its "one release" promise by 84 releases. rensei workarea list now errors with "unknown command." Update any scripts:

# No longer resolves
rensei workarea list

# Current (and has been the whole time)
rensei host workarea list

Daemon - Install and manage the daemon process
Host Capacity - Pool disk limits and eviction
donmai.dev - workarea reference - Full command reference, pool architecture, restore workflow

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