Settings and permissions
Self-driving settings decide how much Coldtea does on a repository without you, and how far its agents can go. You choose them when you set up self-driving for a repository.
These settings appear once self-driving is turned on for your TeaHouse.
Settings are per repository. Each repository you run self-driving on has its own permission, budget, split, default agent, and timezone.
Delivery status
A repository's self-driving is either running or paused.
- Running: Coldtea keeps the repository self-driving, starting new work on the daily schedule.
- Paused: Coldtea does not start any new self-driving work until you resume it.
You can pause and resume delivery at any time from the self-driving settings. Pausing stops new work; it does not undo work already filed or started.
Supervised versus yolo
The permission setting controls how the brews self-driving starts behave.
- Supervised: the agent pauses for approval before it takes actions that need a decision, the same way a local agent prompts you in its own pane.
- Yolo: the agent runs without stopping for those approvals.
Supervised keeps a human in the loop while the work runs. Yolo trades that for speed and is the stronger claim on your machine and your repository, so pick it deliberately. Either way, Coldtea does not merge the result for you. Review still happens before anything ships.
Capacity points
Self-driving files a bounded amount of work each day. The bound is a daily capacity budget, measured in points, and it defaults to 8.
The planner sizes each task it files on a T-shirt scale and spends points from the day's budget as it files:
- XS is 1 point.
- S is 2 points.
- M is 3 points.
- L is 5 points.
- XL is 8 points.
The planner keeps filing, highest-ranked first, until the day's points are spent. Anything larger than XL is broken down into a parent item and smaller pieces rather than filed as one oversized task. Raise the budget to let more through in a day; lower it to keep each day small.
Maintenance and feature split
Work the scouts find is either maintenance or a feature. The split setting is the target share of the day's budget for each, and the two shares add up to 100. The default is 70 percent maintenance and 30 percent feature.
Use the split to steer the planner. A repository you mainly want kept healthy leans toward maintenance; one you are actively growing leans toward features.
Default agent
Self-driving starts its work as cloud brews, and the default agent decides which agent runs them. It can be any of Coldtea's cloud agents (Claude, Codex, or OpenCode) and defaults to Claude. Gemini is local-only and is not a cloud agent, so it is not available here.
Timezone and daily-brief time
Self-driving runs on the repository's clock, so it needs a timezone. You set the repository timezone during setup, and both the planner run and the brief follow it.
Two moments in the day are fixed to that timezone:
- The daily planner runs in the morning, around 08:00 local.
- The daily brief is written in the early evening, around 18:00 local. If work is still in flight, it can defer in short steps up to 19:00.
The emails go out on each recipient's own timezone, not the repository's. Coldtea captures your timezone from your browser and sends your planner and brief around your local 08:00 and 18:00, falling back to the repository timezone only when it has none for you. So the run happens on the repository's clock, and the mail lands on yours.
The repository, default branch, permission, and these times show as read-only values in the self-driving settings once setup is done. To change the branch agents base new work on, use the default base branch under cloud runs.
What you keep control of
You control the emails self-driving sends to you. See daily brief for the per-user brief and planner subscriptions.