Automation responsibilities
Tower separates where a message enters, who coordinates project work, how responsibility survives restarts, how tools are called, and how AI providers execute. These layers compose, but they are not interchangeable.
Responsibility map
| Name | Owns | Does not own |
|---|---|---|
| Gateway | External ingress, verified sender and scope, Tower route selection, and delivery back to the source channel | Repository changes or project reasoning |
| Workbench | The resident coordinator for one project: project-aware discussion, explicit task creation, and child-result review | Chat transport or the implementation task itself |
| Durable protocol | Inbox, batches, ACK, leases, heartbeats, and completion records that preserve responsibility across processes | Business decisions or channel behavior |
| MCP | Bounded Tower tools for AI clients, including project queries, task mutations, and terminal control | External chat connections |
| OpenClaw integration | OpenClaw profile injection, Tower MCP, skills, and channel authorization through Gateway | Tower's source of truth |
| AI Provider extension | A common execution contract for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Qwen, and API providers | Gateway authorization or Workbench scheduling |
Request flow
External channel
-> OpenClaw or another adapter
-> Gateway (identity, authorization, routing)
-> durable inbox + Workbench event
-> project Workbench (discussion or work coordination)
-> Tower MCP / child terminal
-> durable completion + outbox
-> Gateway
-> original message threadA simple Tower query can finish at the Gateway layer. Project discussion enters Workbench but creates no task. Workbench creates and supervises a child task only after an explicit request to create, fix, or execute work.
Why a durable protocol exists
An in-process function return does not prove that responsibility survives a restart. The durable protocol records both pending work and ownership in the database:
ACKmeans a Workbench accepted a batch; it does not mean the business request is complete.lease + heartbeatprevents two runtimes from processing the same responsibility.RESOLVEDmeans the batch was handled or durably delegated.- completion/outbox separates business completion from channel delivery, so a temporary channel outage does not roll back completed work.
This is internal reliability machinery. The UI only needs status, pending count, and heartbeat; internal generation numbers are not user-facing information.