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. This folder is part of the coxswain repository and ships in every release. To install Coxswain, see the root README.

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.

What is here

seats/          one agent definition per seat (eleven), and SEATS.md for the chair
install.sh      links every seat into ~/.claude/agents (SEATS.md is not linked)
check_seats.py  checks every seat's frontmatter: name, description, tools, an explicit model

Checks

From this folder:

cd crew && python3 check_seats.py

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 chair 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
Liam	am_liam	courier — reads the courier inbox, resolves each reference, relays it to its owner	none; acks only
Model steward	none declared	model choice — owns which model each role runs on, read off the run stats; not daniel, who changes skills and workflows	proposes, never applies; one weekly pull request to the provider profile

The chair is the session you are talking to, not a file: bare cox takes the chair lease for its session unless a live cox chair run loop, the same role run unattended, already holds it. seats/SEATS.md says why it has no seat file.

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

cox install and cox upgrade run install.sh for you. To run it by hand from a checkout:

crew/install.sh            # symlink every seat into ~/.claude/agents
crew/install.sh --check    # what is installed, and from where

Symlinks, not copies, so editing a seat here changes what every session loads. --prefix DIR installs into DIR instead. A file that is not a symlink is never overwritten; install.sh says so and skips that seat. --uninstall removes only the links that point here.

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 (see src/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 chair restating itself. In a text session the voice line is dropped. The model steward declares no voice. The other ten voices ship with Kokoro; none is required.