coxswain-crew

A standing cast of named agent seats — who does what, what each may touch, and how each reports — with no employer inside any of them.

Most agent rosters hardcode a workplace into the definitions: this tracker, that board, those conventions. Then the team changes, or you do, and the roster is worthless. Here the seat is the durable part and the employer is a binding you swap.

The six repositories

Repository	Owns	The sentence
coxswain-cartridges	who a run works for	roles → skills, where writes land, tier → model
coxswain-graphs	what runs, and the harness that runs it	sequence, the gate, the ledger
coxswain-crew	who speaks	seats, their authority, their voices
coxswain-tools	the cox command	run records, traces, landing, screens
coxswain	the umbrella	docs, manifest, one-line install

Cartridges say who a run works for, graphs say what runs, the crew says who speaks. Each is usable without the others.

The cast

Three lanes, grouped by what a seat may touch rather than by who reports to whom. The read-only lane exists so findings arrive from eyes that did not do the work.

Seat	Voice	Surface	Write authority
Nova	af_nova	recon — codebase sweeps, log analysis, research, readiness audits	none
Sky	af_sky	triage and incidents — alerts, failures, blast radius	none
Lewis	bm_lewis	review — reads the diff, never the builder's account of it	none, and no merge
Sarah	af_sarah	build — worktree, branch, tests, one pull request	code on its own branch
Michael	am_michael	ops — CI, PR health, deploys, local tooling	its own PR branches
Emma	bf_emma	the board — epics, phases, item bodies, dates, reconciliation	proposes; the chief writes
Echo	am_echo	writing — docs, RFCs, outward-facing replies	drafts only
Alice	bf_alice	scribe — the visual plan for a swarm, tracked to completion	plans/ only
Daniel	bm_daniel	steward — reads the run records and proposes what should change: skills, workflows, spend, hygiene	none; every change is a PR

The chief of staff is the session you are talking to, not a file: see seats/SEATS.md.

A reviewer is independent by construction. Lewis reads the diff and a base ref, never the builder's summary, and is never the instance that wrote the code. He advises — not ready, split this, close it instead — and merge stays human.

Install

git clone https://github.com/ppfenning/coxswain-crew ~/repos/coxswain-crew
~/repos/coxswain-crew/install.sh            # symlinks seats into ~/.claude/agents
~/repos/coxswain-crew/install.sh --check    # what is installed, and from where

Symlinks, not copies, so editing a seat here changes what every session loads. --prefix installs elsewhere; nothing is overwritten unless it is already a symlink into this repository.

Binding a seat to your team

A seat names roles; a cartridge says which skills fill them. Add a cast: block to your team cartridge in coxswain-cartridges:

cast:
  nova:
    skills:   [audit-and-apply, pr-fleet-sweep]
    context:  "the read side of your internal SDK"
  sarah:
    skills:   [feature-lifecycle, test-driven-development]

Unbound seats still work; they simply route to nothing team-specific. Nothing in this repository names a company, a tracker, a board, or a person.

Voice is decoration

Every seat is a plain agent definition and works in any session. In a voice session a seat reports in its own voice, which is how you hear that a finding came from an independent pair of eyes rather than from the chief restating itself. In a text session the voice line is dropped. All nine voices ship with Kokoro; none is required.