Team Coordination Skill
Protocol reference for agents operating within a delegated squad coordination structure. This skill defines the exact message formats and communication conventions that enable delegated, context-efficient team management.
When to Use This Skill
- You are a squad-leader and need to send a spawn request or completion report
- You are a team-lead and need to parse an incoming spawn request or completion report
- You need to understand the communication boundaries and conventions of a delegated squad
Protocol Summary
| Protocol | Sender | Receiver | Purpose | |----------|--------|----------|---------| | Spawn Request | squad-leader | team-lead | Request creation of worker agents | | Completion Report | squad-leader | team-lead | Report task completion or partial progress |
Quick Reference: Spawn Request
SPAWN REQUEST
=============
Task: [one-sentence task description]
Pattern: [pattern name]
Topology: [hub-and-spoke | pipeline | mesh | tree | star | adversarial]
Design phase: [FULL | SHORT-CIRCUITED -- reason]
AGENTS REQUESTED:
1. Name: [agent-name]
Type: [existing agent type]
Model: [opus/sonnet/haiku]
Role: [one-sentence role description]
SKILLS NEEDED:
- Existing: [skill-name] -> assigned to [agent-name]
- Missing: [skill-name] -> [spec or "create with skill-creator-enhanced"]
TASK GRAPH:
Task 1: [description] -> Owner: [agent-name]
Task 2: [description] -> Owner: [agent-name] (blocked by: 1)
READY TO PROCEED: [YES | NO -- reason]Quick Reference: Completion Report
COMPLETION REPORT
=================
Task: [original task description]
Status: [COMPLETE | PARTIAL -- explanation]
Summary:
[2-5 sentences]
Artifacts:
- [files created/modified]
Agents Used:
- [agent-name]: [what they accomplished]
Issues:
- [unresolved problems, or "None"]
Recommendations:
- [follow-up work, or "None"]Detailed Protocol Specifications
For field-by-field specifications, validation rules, edge cases, and examples, see [references/protocols.md](references/protocols.md).
Communication Boundaries
Within a squad (squad-leader + its workers)
- Workers communicate with their squad-leader freely.
- Workers may communicate with peers in the same squad.
- The squad-leader coordinates all work within the squad.
Between squads
- Cross-squad messages go through the team-lead.
- Workers do not message agents in other squads directly.
- Squad-leaders do not message other squad-leaders directly.
These boundaries are enforced by convention in agent prompts, not by system-level restrictions.
Agent Roles Reference
The trio (squad-leader + team-architect + skill-identifier) is the default design-phase team. The agent-explorer is a contingent fourth member, brought in only when a capability gap genuinely cannot be filled by extending or modifying existing skills/agents.
| Agent | Model | Purpose | Tools | |-------|-------|---------|-------| | squad-leader | default | Orchestrates sub-teams, sends spawn requests, manages workers | All standard tools | | team-architect | opus | Selects team patterns and communication topologies | All standard tools | | skill-identifier | default | Identifies required skills, maps to installed ecosystem, surfaces gaps | All standard tools | | agent-explorer | default | Searches plugin catalogs for existing agents/skills matching gaps (contingent) | Read, Glob, Grep, LS, SendMessage |
Models above match the agents' frontmatter model: field. default lets the user's configured default model handle the role; opus is explicit because pattern selection benefits materially from deeper reasoning. Per-spawn overrides at /squad time (e.g., --sonnet) take precedence; see commands/squad.md for the full model policy.
Dependencies
The skills referenced below are bundled with this plugin:
- team-patterns skill (
${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/team-patterns/) -- Used by the team-architect for pattern selection - skill-identification skill (
${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/skill-identification/) -- Used by the skill-identifier for capability analysis - agent-prompt-engineering skill (
${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/agent-prompt-engineering/) -- Used by the squad-leader when crafting initial briefing messages for workers (Phase 3, step 4)