three-man-team vs Trellis
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. — versus — Spec, task and memory layer that lives in your repo: .trellis/ holds conventions, PRDs and journals, auto-injected each session — one workflow across 20 coding-agent platforms.
Both encode an engineering discipline as repo files: three-man-team is a lightweight Architect/Builder/Reviewer process you read and follow; Trellis enforces its loop with auto-injected specs, task state and journals.
| three-man-team | Trellis | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 891 | 13k |
| Forks | 112 | 739 |
| Language | Shell | TypeScript |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Last activity | 1 months ago | today |
| Topics | skills, coding | coding, memory |
| Curated connections | 3 | 2 |
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).
Trellis — the curator's take
Attacks the right problem — agents restart from zero every session — with the boring, durable fix: files in the repo, not a memory service. Team-shared specs are the real moat; one engineer's hard-won rules compound for everyone. It's opinionated though: the 4-phase loop (brainstorm → implement → check → update-spec) only pays if the team actually adopts the process — half-adopted, .trellis/ rots into stale paperwork. AGPL-3.0: fine to use, but check your company's license policy. Skip it for weekend projects; this is process overhead that needs a team to amortize.