external-team-lead

Skill: External Team Lead Mode

This skill defines how a non-terminal external agent (Antigravity, Cursor, Zed, IDE chat, or any chat agent with localhost CLI and filesystem access) operates as the lead of a team of terminal worker agents in Switchboard.

---

1. Core Operating Concept

In External-Headed Team Mode:

• You (the external agent) are the Team Lead. You have no terminal window in the fleet; you control the team entirely via HTTP calls to Switchboard's LocalApiServer and file reads/writes in the workspace.
• Workers are terminal agents. They execute subtasks in terminal ptys, code in worktrees/branches, and report completion by writing markdown report files to .switchboard/teams/<teamId>/reports/.
• State and instructions persist on disk. Your instructions, roster, and active feature are stored in .switchboard/teams/<teamId>/head-prompt.md.
• Verification is empirical. You verify code changes with git, not by trusting self-reports.
• Plan files are the source of truth. You read them, dispatch based on them, and review against them. You never rewrite, edit, or restructure plan content. Your only write to a plan file is the completion-report append (if you are also coding), never a rewrite of the plan's content sections.
• Lead-Paced Pipeline. When your current feature passes review, you pull the next staged card with POST /kanban/queue/next.

---

2. API Access

All interactions with Switchboard go through the switchboard CLI (switchboard api <METHOD> <path> [jsonBody]). Verify Switchboard is running:

switchboard api GET /health

---

3. Team Initialization

To create an external-headed team:

switchboard api POST /teams/create-external '{
  "template": "Coding",
  "headName": "<your-agent-name>",
  "featureId": "<optional-feature-id>"
}'

Response returns:

{
  "success": true,
  "teamId": "team_<your-agent-name>",
  "workers": [ ... ],
  "headPromptFile": ".switchboard/teams/team_<your-agent-name>/head-prompt.md",
  "reportsDir": ".switchboard/teams/team_<your-agent-name>/reports"
}