Teams

Teams is an installable team workspace where a Team Leader agent breaks a Mission into a dependency-aware task board and dispatches it to a fixed roster of specialist robots. A scheduler runs teammates in their own Mission threads and only wakes the Leader when synthesis, handoffs, or final review is needed.

Teams ships behind the built-in agent-teams plugin. After enabling it from the Plugins catalog, Desktop shows a Team sidebar entry; the Team panel is the primary entry point for creating Missions and inspecting the team board.

NOTE

Teams is a managed App Binding runtime built on Session Core. Each teammate's Mission thread is an ordinary top-level DotCraft Thread, with its own context, tools, history, and audit.

When to Use Teams

Scenario	Recommendation
One-shot self-contained delegation inside an existing chat	SubAgents
A user request that needs planning, parallel work, and a synthesized final reply	Teams
Recurring or scheduled work driven by a workspace task	Automations
Keeping one Thread moving toward a long-running objective	Goals

Teams is overkill when the work fits comfortably inside one Thread. It is the right call when work naturally splits across roles, has explicit dependencies, or benefits from a Leader-owned synthesis at the end.

Default Roster

The team roster is fixed:

Member	Role
Team Leader	Breaks down Missions, assigns work, coordinates the team, writes the user-facing final response.
Explorer	Researches, inspects, and maps unknowns.
Builder	Implements changes and produces artifacts.
Reviewer	Checks quality, risks, and correctness.
Operator	Handles app- and computer-oriented operational tasks.

Per-role customization (Skills, MCP servers, plugins, prompt, permission mode, tool surface) is on the roadmap. Dynamic team or member creation is intentionally out of scope.

Mission Lifecycle

A Mission is the user-facing delivery unit. Each Mission owns a task board, mailbox events, and a final response.

Status	Meaning
planning	Mission created; Leader input queued or running.
active	Leader has recorded a plan or dispatched at least one task.
awaitingLeaderReview	All required Tasks and review gates complete; Leader must write finalResponse.
done	Leader has finalized the Mission with finalResponse.
cancelled	User cancelled the Mission; non-done Tasks under it are cancelled.

Only terminal Missions (done or cancelled) can be archived. Archiving keeps state — it does not delete the Mission or its teammate threads.

TIP

In Desktop, cancellation and archival are card actions: drag a Mission card to the discard pile and confirm. The discard pile is not a clickable button — the drag is the deliberate gesture.

Task Board

Tasks (TeamTask) form a Mission-scoped shared board with explicit assignee, status, dependencies, blockers, output summary, and metadata.

Status	Meaning
pending	Created, waiting for scheduler evaluation.
waitingDependencies	Blocked on upstream tasks.
ready	Can run, but assignee thread is not yet ready.
running	Queued or running in the assignee's Mission thread.
blocked	Assignee reported a blocker requiring action elsewhere.
review	Work complete; a review gate has not yet accepted it.
done	Accepted for Mission finalization.
failed	Cannot continue without Mission-level recovery.
cancelled	Cancelled with its Mission or by an explicit Teams decision.

Tasks reference each other by short Mission-scoped aliases (t1, t2), and artifacts use similar aliases (a1, a2); canonical ids (task_..., artifact_...) remain stored for compatibility.

Dependencies and Leader Synthesis

• The Leader records explicit dependencies via dependsOnTaskIds when assigning a task.
• A task can be marked requiresLeaderSynthesis when downstream work needs the Leader to interpret upstream results before dispatch — the scheduler wakes the Leader once upstream finishes and holds teammate dispatch until synthesis is supplied.
• Reviews are a task property (kind = "review"), not a hardcoded role rule. Any member can be assigned a review task.

Collaboration Loop

Teammates communicate through:

• Mailbox messages (SendMessage) — lightweight Mission-scoped events between members or to the Leader. They are not turns in any thread; the scheduler coalesces them and may wake the recipient when the message is actionable.
• Artifacts (PublishArtifact) — explicit handoff records with title, path or URI, and summary. Publication does not complete a task; teammates still call MarkTaskDone or ReportProgress(status: "blocked").
• Progress (ReportProgress) — running progress or blocker updates; not a completion signal.

The Leader does not poll. After dispatching work or sending a message, the Leader ends its turn; the scheduler wakes it when task results, blockers, teammate messages, synthesis needs, or final review require attention.

Desktop UI

The Team panel is a card-game collaboration board:

• Robot teammate cards, Mission cards, and Task cards with live status pulled from Teams state.
• A right-side detail rail for the selected teammate, mission, or task.
• A primary Mission Draft workflow on the board for creating new Missions.
• Thread links that open the real Mission teammate thread when context allows; Mission teammate threads also appear in the ordinary conversation list while the plugin is enabled.

Status pills surface scheduler-relevant states (waitingDependencies, blocked, review, awaitingLeaderReview, done) so a stalled Mission can be diagnosed from the board.

Configuration

Teams is gated by the built-in agent-teams plugin. State is persisted under:

.craft/teams/state.json
.craft/teams/missions/{missionId}/

The mission scratchpad / artifact workspace path is mounted into each Mission teammate thread as an App Context Block, so teammates know where to drop durable handoff material.

Runtime fields live in the teams config section. See Configuration Reference for available keys.

See Also

• SubAgents — single-level delegation when Teams is overkill.
• Automations & Goals — schedule-driven tasks and Thread-level objectives that pair with Teams Missions.
• Unified Session Core — Thread / Turn / Item model that underpins Mission teammate threads.