team-creator

Team Creator

Intro

team-creator derives a provider-neutral AI team by scoring all accessible models on four weighted dimensions (Capability, Cost, Latency, Governance) and mapping the 8 processkit role archetypes onto the resulting heavy / medium / light tiers. It composes 5 existing skills — no new primitives or MCP tools are introduced.

Overview

When to use

Trigger	Command
New project or provider subscription	team-create
Quarterly landscape shift	team-review → team-rebalance
Provider outage, rapid rotation	team-rebalance --roles all
Spot-check current assignments	team-review

Inputs (key parameters)

Parameter	Required	Default	Notes
--subscription <provider>:<tier>	yes	—	e.g. anthropic:max-5x
--governance-floor <0-5>	no	3	Models below excluded before scoring
--parallelism-cap <1-10>	no	5	PM always capped at 1
--weight-overrides <json>	no	see formula	Must sum to 1.0 ± 0.001; CLI > DEC-*-TeamWeights > defaults
--threshold-overrides <json>	no	{"heavy_min":0.70,"medium_min":0.40}	CLI > DEC-*-TeamWeights > defaults
--landscape-artifact <ART-id>	no	3-level discovery	Explicit > project-tag > kit default; see references/landscape-resolution.md
--landscape <ART-id>	no	alias for --landscape-artifact	Kept for backwards compatibility

Tiering formula (summary)

Defaults rebalanced 2026-04-15 after Phase 3 dogfood (see ART-20260415_1545-TeamWeaver-team-creator-dogfood-diff §7). Capability weight raised from 0.40 to 0.60 to prevent tier inversion on same-provider candidate sets where cost and capability are anti-correlated.

Dim	Weight	Source
Capability (C)	0.60	swe_bench + community rating, normalised
Cost efficiency (K)	0.20	1 / (output_price × quota_burn), normalised
Latency fit (L)	0.10	output_tokens_per_sec, normalised
Governance (G)	0.10	G-score from model-recommender, normalised

TierScore ≥ 0.70 → heavy | 0.40–0.69 → medium | < 0.40 → light

See references/tiering-formula.md for normalisation, thresholds, and a full worked example.

Role archetypes → tier mapping

Role	Tier pin	Override?
project-manager	heavy	Never (immutable)
senior-architect	heavy	Medium only if no heavy clears G-floor + owner approval
senior-researcher	heavy	Same as senior-architect
junior-architect	medium	Heavy if capability gap > 15pp on SWE-bench
developer	medium	Heavy if --security-critical flag set
junior-researcher	medium	No override
junior-developer	light	Medium if no light model accessible
assistant	light	No override; shares junior-developer model if no light available

See references/role-archetypes.md for full override-when rules.

Project-level overrides: if context/team/role-archetypes.yaml exists, it is loaded before archetype mapping and validated eagerly. See references/role-archetypes-override.md for schema and invariants.

Commands

team-create runs the full derivation: queries models, applies the tiering formula, maps archetypes, writes 8 Role + 8 Actor + 8 Binding entities, rewrites context/team/roster.md, and emits a chartering DecisionRecord that explicitly supersedes the prior team DecisionRecord. Use --dry-run to print the plan without writing.

team-review is read-only. Re-scores current assignments against the latest landscape snapshot, diffs tier scores against those stored in the governing DecisionRecord, and surfaces tier-shifts, unavailable models, and new outperformers. No entities are written.

team-rebalance applies a review recommendation. Requires --confirm. For --roles all, the full create logic re-runs and a new DecisionRecord is written. For named roles, the governing DecisionRecord's progress_notes are amended instead.

Outputs

Output	team-create	team-review	team-rebalance
Role / Actor / Binding entities	YES ×8	NO	scoped roles
context/team/roster.md	YES	NO	YES (in-place)
DecisionRecord	YES (new)	NO	amend notes
Diff report	NO	YES (stdout)	NO

Gotchas

• Missing landscape-summary artifact. This skill ingests a pre-structured markdown artifact tagged landscape-summary, NOT raw HTML. If none exists, error: "No landscape-summary artifact found. Run the Haiku landscape-ingest task to produce ART-*-LandscapeSnapshot before team-create." Do not parse HTML.

• Entity deactivation sequence on re-create. When team-create is re-run: (a) resolve prior team from roster.md; (b) for each prior Binding call binding-management.end_binding with reason="superseded by team-create run <timestamp>"; (c) for each prior Actor whose model is NOT in the new team call actor-profile.deactivate_actor; (d) for prior Actors whose model IS re-assigned to the same role REUSE the existing Actor — do not create a duplicate; (e) then create new Bindings.

• Formula weight persistence. Weights live in the chartering DecisionRecord's spec.inputs_snapshot block. team-rebalance reads them via decision-record.get_decision. No skill-local config file for weights.

• Tier-collapse (< 3 tiers accessible). Promote the two highest- scoring light models to medium. Never fail; degrade gracefully.

• PM clone cap. Parallelism cap never applies to project-manager; PM is always exactly 1 (per DEC-20260414_0900).

• Snapshot staleness. Artifact older than 90 days → warn and proceed. Surface the artifact date in the DecisionRecord.

• Provider-neutrality. Never hardcode any model name, provider name, or tier label anywhere in this skill. All identifiers flow in from model-recommender.

• Override audit trails (OpenWeave layers 1–4). Each override layer produces a distinct audit entry in the chartering team DecisionRecord's inputs_snapshot:

  • Layer 1 (landscape): landscape_artifact_source records "explicit" | "project-tag" | "kit-default" and the resolved ART-id. The project-tagged artifact (ART-*) is itself the audit record for who created the custom landscape.
  • Layer 2 (weights): weights_source + weights block records which DEC--TeamWeights (if any) was applied, or "cli" / "skill-default". The DEC--TeamWeights record carries its own rationale and deciders.
  • Layer 3 (thresholds): tier_thresholds_source + tier_thresholds block; co-located with Layer 2 in the same DEC-*-TeamWeights record (causally coupled — cannot drift).
  • Layer 4 (role pins): archetype_override_file, archetype_override_semantics, and archetype_overrides list each overridden role with its new pin. The context/team/role-archetypes.yaml file itself is the persistent record. Any run with overrides: query the single chartering team DecisionRecord to fully reconstruct the run's configuration.

• Canonical schema fields (processkit v0.16.0). This skill emits five fields introduced in v0.16.0: Role fields primary_contact (bool), clone_cap (int), cap_escalation (string); Actor fields is_template (bool), templated_from (string, nullable). Seed Actors are always is_template: true; rebalance-spawned clones are is_template: false with templated_from pointing at the seed.

Agent-driven discovery

Agents can resolve user intent into the correct override layer using the trigger phrases below. These are additive to the existing team-creator triggers above — they extend the skill-finder entries, not replace them.

Layer	Trigger phrases	Routed action
Layer 1 — landscape	"use our own model list", "we have a custom provider set", "this project uses different models", "update the landscape for this project"	Create project-tagged landscape artifact (landscape-summary-project tag + project_id); pass --landscape-artifact to team-create
Layer 2 — weights	"we value latency more", "cost matters more here", "prioritise governance", "adjust the scoring weights", "latency is critical for this project"	Write a DEC-*-TeamWeights record (tag: team-weights-override) via decision-record-write; re-run team-create to pick it up
Layer 3 — thresholds	"the tier cutoffs don't fit our model set", "too many models landing in medium", "adjust the heavy threshold", "nothing is reaching heavy tier"	Amend or create DEC-*-TeamWeights with a tier_thresholds block; validate against rules in references/team-weights-decision-schema.md
Layer 4 — pins	"pin senior-architect to medium for this project", "we want all researchers on heavy", "remap role classes", "change the role tier assignments"	Create or update context/team/role-archetypes.yaml; re-run team-create (eager validation fires on startup)

Agents MUST consult skill-finder before routing any of these requests. The trigger phrases are designed to match natural-language owner requests without the owner naming the override layer explicitly.

No-skill-inflation rationale

Option C chosen over extending agent-management (heaviest skill; scope bleed) or model-recommender (individual model profiling vs. team orchestration). Pure orchestration consumer: 5 existing skills composed, 3 commands added, 0 new primitives or MCP tools.