Teams

A team is a reusable setup you install into a fresh house: a bundle of agents plus a few threads, defined once and installed any number of times. Think quickstart, or “share my setup” — instead of hand-creating a house, pinning threads, and wiring up bots one by one, you write it down once as a team.json and run one command. It adds no new runtime concepts; installing one is the same createHouse / createThread / createAgent you’d do by hand, bundled together.

Install a team

A few teams ship with arbe (see Bundled teams below). mull, for instance, is a structured-thinking setup — a thread plus a handful of bots that take an idea through clarify → research → design → plan. To install it into a new house:

arbe team install packages/teams/mull/team.json --param title="Auth rewrite"

That creates the house, the pinned threads, and the bots, then prints their ids, URLs, and each bot’s one-time API key. Every thread is tagged with the team slug so one install is addressable as a group, and bots get rw on the house so they reach every thread without per-thread grants.

--param key=value fills in values the team asks for (see params below). It’s a generic flag rather than --title because each team declares its own params and the CLI parses flags before reading the team file — so one --param accepts any team’s params. Those values substitute into house.name_template: "Mull: {{title}}" becomes "Mull: Auth rewrite". Install is one-way with no rollback — if it fails partway, delete the half-made house by hand. Pass --json for a stable machine-readable result (TeamInstallOutput).

Write your own

Teams live in packages/teams/<slug>/. A long system prompt lives in its own markdown file under prompts/ and is pulled in with { "$ref": "./prompts/name.md" }; a ref that climbs out of the folder (../) is rejected. A minimal team.json:

{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "slug": "standup",
  "title": "Standup",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "house": { "name_template": "Standup: {{team}}" },
  "params": [{ "key": "team", "label": "Which team?", "required": true }],
  "threads": [{ "name": "daily", "tags": ["standup"] }],
  "agents": [
    {
      "kind": "bot",
      "name": "facilitator",
      "trigger_mode": "mention",
      "system_prompt": { "$ref": "./prompts/facilitator.md" }
    }
  ]
}

• params — values the operator supplies at install time (key, label, optional required, default true). A missing required param fails the install. v1 only substitutes them into house.name_template.
• threads — each has a name and optional free-form tags; the installer also stamps the team slug.
• agents — bots only in v1. Each needs system_prompt (inline or $ref) and a trigger_mode of mention, ambient, or always (ambient may set ambient_delay_ms, 100–30000). model is optional and falls back to the default bot model. role is a label for humans, stripped before install — behaviour lives in the prompt.

The team agent shape is deliberately separate from the DB agent row: adding a field to the canonical agent schema does not flow into teams. Changing either is a conscious choice.

Bundled teams

• mull — staged thinking. @0-orchestrator, six stage agents (@1-clarify → @6-plan), and a @check reviewer, all on the default model and mention-only.
• pingpong — bot→bot dispatch verifier. Two pairs producing a deterministic 3-message rally, used by tests/operator-debug-prompt.md.
• kanteen — a fictional restaurant: three threads (floor, kitchen, finance) with mixed trigger modes, exercising multi-thread flows the others don’t reach.

Under the hood

TeamSchema validates the on-disk file ($refs unresolved); ResolvedTeamSchema validates it once prompts are inlined; the installer takes a resolved team.

Code: @arbe/teams (resolver), @arbe/core/install-team (installer), @arbe/core/schemas/team (shapes).
See also system/agents and cli.

Not yet: a team registry or remote origins (install by local path only); uninstall / reinstall (delete the house by hand); routing rules in the schema; per-agent param substitution; kind: 'human' agents.