squad vs three-man-team
Multi-agent terminal collaboration for AI CLIs: a manager, workers and an inspector — Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, OpenCode — coordinating through one-shot shell commands and SQLite. No daemon. — versus — A disciplined 3-agent dev process as context files — Architect plans, Builder builds the brief, Reviewer gates — running in one Claude Code session via subagents. Token-frugal by design.
Same manager/worker/inspector shape, different substance: Squad is tooling — agents coordinating through shell commands and SQLite; Three Man Team is pure process — personas and handoff rules inside a single Claude Code session.
| squad | three-man-team | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 605 | 877 |
| Forks | 60 | 112 |
| Language | Rust | Shell |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Last activity | 1 months ago | 1 months ago |
| Topics | coding, orchestration | skills, coding |
| Curated connections | 3 | 2 |
squad — the curator's take
The unix-philosophy take on multi-agent coding: no daemon, no server, no framework — each agent is a terminal running the CLI you already use, coordinating through /squad slash commands backed by SQLite. Assign a manager, spin workers, add an inspector, watch them divide the work. Radically simpler to reason about than orchestration platforms, and it dies clean (every command is one-shot). NOT for production pipelines or unattended fleets — it's built for a human watching terminals; young (~600 stars) and quiet for weeks at review time, so kick the tires before making it a habit.
three-man-team — the curator's take
It's a process, not software: three markdown personas with strict handoffs (plan → brief → build → review → deploy) that target the classic solo-agent failure modes — scope drift, unrequested features, token burn. The five CLAUDE.md token rules ('is this speculative? kill the tool call') are genuinely good hygiene even outside the team. Everything runs in one Claude Code session via the Agent tool; works with anything that reads context files. NOT a framework, and not for exploratory hacking — the ceremony pays off on production work and taxes quick experiments. Know the two strings attached: a commercial 'Pro' waitlist, and Arch phones a version registry at session start to offer updates (auditable, consent-gated, but it's there).