teammode

Teammode

Run a named team of cooperating Codex workers under one leader, with durable state on disk. This is a Codex-only workflow. It never depends on an external terminal runner - it coordinates through Codex's own collaboration tools plus a bundled state script, on ONE of two transports chosen up front: native MultiAgentV2 agents, or Codex App threads as the fallback.

When to use a team (and when to use plain subagents instead)

Use a TEAM when EITHER holds:

• the work does NOT split into perfectly isolated pieces, but doing it in parallel is clearly more convenient - members will need to see and react to each other's findings; or
• one task still needs exploration, yet its GOAL is already clear - parallel investigation under a fixed objective.

Use plain fire-and-forget subagents ($ulw / one-off spawn_agent workers) - NOT a team - when EITHER holds:

• the work IS perfectly isolated, so there is no coordination cost worth paying; or
• the GOAL is still ambiguous, where one mind should resolve direction before any fan-out.

A team buys cross-member coordination at a real overhead cost; only spend it when coordination is the thing you actually need.

Pick the transport FIRST - then tell the user

Before creating any team state, decide which transport this session can run. Inspect your active tool list and select:

1. MultiAgentV2 (preferred) - select when the flat V2 collaboration tools are ALL active: flat spawn_agent whose schema requires task_name, plus send_message, followup_task, wait_agent, list_agents, and interrupt_agent. Members are durable native agents addressed by task name / agent path (/root/<task_name>). The namespaced multi_agent_v1.* surface never qualifies as a team transport.
2. Codex App threads (fallback) - select when flat V2 is not available but the codex_app.* thread tools are (create_thread, read_thread, send_message_to_thread, set_thread_title, set_thread_archived).
3. Neither set visible - if a tool_search tool is active, search for the missing sets (e.g. spawn_agent, codex_app) before concluding: some environments defer tools behind tool search. A hit is only a lead: revalidate that the visible result is the COMPLETE, mutually compatible transport set from case 1 or 2 before selecting it. Do not combine partial hits from different transports.
4. Neither set exists - teammode cannot run here. Do NOT run init or fake a team with partial tooling. If another visible plain-subagent mechanism can independently spawn, communicate with, and observe plain workers, announce that exact mechanism and use it for non-overlapping scopes. Otherwise continue serially and report the capability limitation; never promise or imply plain subagents that this session cannot create.