a-team

name	a-team
description	Use when a project needs role-based team coordination — PM breakdown, parallel specialist execution, review gates. Best for multi-deliverable projects vs tiger-team (single problem) or zellij-team (independent tasks).

A-Team — Role-Based Project Team Coordination

Overview

Inspired by a.team: don't send solo agents — form a project team with specific roles. A PM coordinates, engineers execute, specialists advise, reviewers gate quality. The team has continuity across the project lifecycle.

Roles

Role	Agent	Purpose
pm	Project Manager	Reads brief, breaks into tasks, assigns to specialists, synthesizes final output
engineer	Implementation	Writes code, runs commands, produces artifacts
reviewer	Quality Gate	Checks engineer + specialist output, flags issues before PM synthesis
specialist	Domain Expert	Configurable domain: "security", "ansible", "elixir", "performance", etc.

Coordination Flow

Phase 1: PM Breakdown
  ┌─────────┐
  │   PM    │  reads brief → task list + role assignments
  └────┬────┘
       │
Phase 2: Parallel Execution
  ┌────┴────┬────────────┐
  │ Engineer │ Specialist │  work assigned tasks in parallel
  └────┬────┴─────┬──────┘
       │          │
Phase 3: Review Gate
  ┌────┴──────────┴──┐
  │     Reviewer     │  checks all output, flags issues
  └────────┬─────────┘
           │
Phase 4: PM Synthesis
  ┌────────┴─────────┐
  │   PM (final)     │  integrates, writes summary/ship report
  └──────────────────┘

Each phase runs explicitly via --phase 1|2|3|4 so you see output between phases.

Quick Start

# Phase 1: PM breaks down the project
nu ~/.claude/skills/a-team/a-team.nu --phase 1 \
  --brief "Deploy gastown rate limiter to Pi fleet"

# Phase 2: Engineer + Specialist execute in parallel panes
nu ~/.claude/skills/a-team/a-team.nu --phase 2 \
  --brief "Deploy gastown rate limiter to Pi fleet" \
  --specialist "ansible"

# Phase 3: Reviewer checks output
nu ~/.claude/skills/a-team/a-team.nu --phase 3 \
  --brief "Deploy gastown rate limiter to Pi fleet"

# Dry run any phase
nu ~/.claude/skills/a-team/a-team.nu --dry-run --phase 1 \
  --brief "Deploy gastown rate limiter to Pi fleet"

When to Use: a-team vs tiger-team vs zellij-team

	a-team	tiger-team	zellij-team
Shape	Project team with roles	Same problem, specialist lenses	Parallel tasks, generic workers
Coordination	Sequential phases + review gates	Parallel analysis, synthesize	Fire-and-forget parallel
Best for	Multi-deliverable projects	Deep investigation of one issue	Independent, parallelizable tasks
PM?	Yes — plans, assigns, synthesizes	No — each lens is peer	No — tasks are self-contained
Review gate?	Yes — reviewer checks before ship	No — synthesis is the gate	No
Example	"Deploy service to fleet: build, distribute, configure, verify"	"Why is auth latency spiking?"	"Fix these 5 independent bugs"

Agent Flags

All agents run with --dangerously-skip-permissions --permission-mode bypassPermissions by default. Override with --mode default for interactive permission prompts.

Output Convention

Each phase writes output to /tmp/a-team-<brief-hash>/:

• phase1-pm-plan.md — PM's task breakdown
• phase2-engineer.md — Engineer's output
• phase2-specialist.md — Specialist's output
• phase3-review.md — Reviewer's findings
• phase4-summary.md — PM's final synthesis