team-decision

Team Decision

Deprecated: Agent Teams via /team-orchestrate is deprecated — the TeamCreate/TeamDelete/TaskCreate/TaskUpdate tools were removed from Claude Code (every session now has one implicit team). Prefer /orchestrate, which already runs agents in the background. The independence and cost-benefit criteria below still apply when deciding whether to dispatch agents in parallel within /orchestrate.

Overview

The team decision skill guides the choice between parallel Agent Teams execution and sequential subagent orchestration. This skill analyzes task characteristics to determine whether parallel execution is safe, beneficial, and cost-effective.

Owner Agent: Senku (Planner Agent)

Consumers: Orchestrator (primary decision maker)

Key Principles

1. Safety First: Only parallelize when tasks are truly independent
2. Cost-Benefit Analysis: Parallel overhead must be justified by time savings
3. File Ownership: Exclusive file ownership prevents conflicts
4. Fail to Sequential: When in doubt, use sequential orchestration

When to Use This Skill

Apply team decision analysis when:

• A task naturally decomposes into multiple subtasks
• Subtasks could potentially run in parallel
• Time-to-completion is a priority
• Determining whether to spawn a team or orchestrate sequentially

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Decision Criteria Table

Criterion	Use Teams (Parallel)	Use Sequential
Task Independence	No shared state or files	Tasks have dependencies
File Ownership	Exclusive file sets	Overlapping file sets
Parallelism Safety	Safe or Moderate	Risky
Number of Tasks	2-4 independent tasks	1 task or 5+ tasks
Time Sensitivity	High (user waiting)	Low (can afford serial)
Coordination Cost	Low (simple merge)	High (complex merge)
Risk Tolerance	High (can retry)	Low (must be correct)

Quick Decision Flowchart

Task Decomposition Available?
  |
  +-- NO --> Sequential (single agent)
  |
  +-- YES
        |
        v
      Subtasks Share Files?
        |
        +-- YES --> Sequential (conflict risk)
        |
        +-- NO
              |
              v
            Subtasks Have Dependencies?
              |
              +-- YES --> Sequential (ordering required)
              |
              +-- NO
                    |
                    v
                  2-4 Subtasks?
                    |
                    +-- NO --> Sequential (too few or too many)
                    |
                    +-- YES
                          |
                          v
                        Time Savings > Overhead?
                          |
                          +-- YES --> TEAMS (Parallel)
                          |
                          +-- NO --> Sequential