Not every project is worked by an agent. Some you drive yourself, in your own editor, with your own tooling — and the work still goes through Meshly Build, because the board is where the task, the review and the audit trail live regardless of who does the typing.
A project in that state is manual-only on this Station. It is enabled, it has agents, its working directory is configured — it is simply not dispatched to.
How a project becomes manual-only
A project is manual-only on this machine when Claude Code is not selected as its tool in the project's settings. There is no separate switch to find: choosing a different tool, or none, is the same statement.
The setting is per machine, like every other per-project setting on Build Station. A project you drive by hand here can still be dispatched to a colleague's Station that does have Claude Code selected for it.
What changes
- Build sends no tasks and no reviews here for that project.
- Queued work already accepted is dropped, not left to rot. Each dropped dispatch is closed with
project_manual_only, so Build finishes it immediately rather than waiting out its acceptance deadline and then reporting a Station that never answered. Without this, a queued task would spawn a session for a project you had just said is driven by hand, as soon as a slot freed. - A dispatch aimed at this Station specifically is refused, and says so. Build reports which machine declined and why, rather than accepting the work and stalling on it.
Nothing about the project is deconfigured. Turn Claude Code back on and dispatch resumes.
Why the dashboard tells you about it
The Dashboard shows a line like "2 projects driven by hand" whenever any project is in this state.
This is deliberate, and it is there for a different person than the one who made the choice. The dashboard is the screen somebody opens when the board looks stuck and they want to know why nothing is running. A project driven by hand is a perfectly good reason for silence — and it is invisible from the counts above it, because the project is enabled and has agents and looks entirely healthy. A confirmation dialog at the moment of the choice cannot answer that question later, because the person asking it is usually not the person who chose.
When to use it
- You are working the project yourself and do not want an agent picking up tasks underneath you.
- A shared machine where one project belongs to an agent and another belongs to a person.
- Temporarily quieting a project during a migration, a release, or anything else where an autonomous session would be unwelcome.
What it is not
- Not the same as disabling an agent. Disabling an agent stops that agent everywhere on this machine. This stops all dispatch for one project, whichever agent it was aimed at. See Enabling and disabling agents.
- Not a way to pause the whole Station. If you want the machine to take no work at all, sign out or quit.
- Not visible to other Stations. Another machine with Claude Code selected for the same project keeps taking work for it.
Checking from Meshly Build
From the board side, list_workstations reports accepts_tasks and accepts_reviews for each Station and project, so you can see what a machine will actually take before targeting a dispatch at it. An offline Station is listed rather than hidden, because an offline machine is a normal recoverable state — the dispatch waits and is delivered on reconnect — while a manual-only one will refuse. Those are different answers to "why is nothing happening", and they deserve to look different.