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A Mothership is a named workspace dedicated to one domain, such as billing or onboarding. It plans and delegates: each piece of work goes to a subagent, its crew, while the Mothership keeps its own context lean and stays in its turn managing the crew until they finish. Motherships are available when Replicas enables them for your organization.

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Create a Mothership

  1. Click + next to Motherships in the left sidebar.
  2. Give it a name and icon, pick an environment, and write its brief: what it owns, plus an optional first task.
  3. Send it work in any of its chats. It waits for its subagents and acts on each result as it arrives. You can message it while it waits.
Every chat in a Mothership runs as its orchestrator, with the brief in its instructions.

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Waiting for subagents

After delegating, the Mothership keeps its turn going and waits for news from its subagents: a finished turn, or pull requests that are ready or need attention. It ends its turn when nothing is left to wait for, when it needs a decision from you, or after waiting an hour in one turn. Later results start a new turn. A message you send while it waits reaches it right away in Claude and Codex chats. With other agents, the Mothership gives a short status update, ends its turn, and then answers your message. The Motherships section lists your Motherships with their status: needs attention, working (the Mothership or any of its crew is working or following up pull requests), ready, or idle. Expand one to see its crew with each subagent’s state and pull requests. Click a subagent to open it in the Mothership’s right pane.

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Notes

A Mothership keeps notes on its domain, ongoing work and decisions in ~/.replicas/canvas/mothership-notes.md. It reads them at the start of each turn and updates them when something durable changes. The file survives the workspace sleeping, and you can read it in the Canvas.

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Subagents

Each subagent is its own workspace with its own sandbox, built from the same environment as its Mothership. It receives only the task the Mothership writes for it, and it does not see uncommitted changes in the Mothership. Subagents stay out of the workspace list. Find them under their Mothership in the sidebar, or click the Subagents button in the Mothership’s header to see each one’s state and pull requests, then pick one to open it in the right pane. There you can follow its work, message it directly, or open its full workspace. Replies to your own messages stay in the subagent’s workspace. A Mothership can hold up to 10 subagents that are not archived. The Mothership archives a subagent once its pull requests are merged or closed, and messaging an archived subagent restores it. Subagents cannot spawn their own subagents.

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Pull request follow-through

A subagent that opens a pull request is not done until the pull request is ready. CI failures and review comments are still fixed automatically in the subagent’s workspace, and the Mothership tracks them instead of calling the work finished. Once activity settles, the Mothership gets one report per subagent:
  • Ready: CI passes, automatic fixes are done, and nothing but a human review or branch protection blocks the merge. The report summarizes what was fixed along the way.
  • Needs attention: CI still fails with no fix running, the pull request is a draft, has conflicts or another merge blocker such as requested changes, or fixes have not settled within an hour. The Mothership messages the subagent or asks you.
  • Merged or closed: the subagent’s task is done, and the Mothership archives it.
When every subagent’s pull request is ready, the Mothership gives you one consolidated summary.

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Tools

The Mothership manages subagents with these tools from the Replicas MCP server. Workspaces get the server when they are created, so Motherships created after they were enabled have them. They are not available in Cursor chats.