team-composition-patterns

Guidance for choosing and organizing teams of coding agents, including team size, roles, and how agents work together.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for setting up review, feature, or debugging teams, selecting agent roles, and choosing how agents are displayed and coordinated.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork when deciding how many agents a task needs and what each agent should do.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-teams plugin — 6 skills, 7 commands, 4 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wshobson/agents/team-composition-patterns
Any agent
npx skills add wshobson/agents --skill team-composition-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wshobson/agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-teams, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 7 commands, 4 agents.

Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,750 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00114 $0.01750
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00875
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00350
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00175

Measured 3d ago against content hash e158dd0e38d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

team-composition-patterns scanned grade B with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Reads agent configuration directoriesmediumAgent snooping

.claude/, .codex/, .gemini/ hold keys, settings and other credentials a mod has no legitimate need for.

Configure in `~/.claude/settings.json`:
plugins/agent-teams/skills/team-composition-patterns/SKILL.md · 142 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 142 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Team Composition Patterns

Best practices for composing multi-agent teams, selecting team sizes, choosing agent types, and configuring display modes for Claude Code's Agent Teams feature.

When to Use This Skill

  • Deciding how many teammates to spawn for a task
  • Choosing between preset team configurations
  • Selecting the right agent type (subagent_type) for each role
  • Configuring teammate display modes (tmux, iTerm2, in-process)
  • Building custom team compositions for non-standard workflows

Team Sizing Heuristics

Complexity Team Size When to Use
Simple 1-2 Single-dimension review, isolated bug, small feature
Moderate 2-3 Multi-file changes, 2-3 concerns, medium features
Complex 3-4 Cross-cutting concerns, large features, deep debugging
Very Complex 4-5 Full-stack features, comprehensive reviews, systemic issues

Rule of thumb: Start with the smallest team that covers all required dimensions. Adding teammates increases coordination overhead.

Preset Team Compositions

Review Team

  • Size: 3 reviewers
  • Agents: 3x team-reviewer
  • Default dimensions: security, performance, architecture
  • Use when: Code changes need multi-dimensional quality assessment

Debug Team

  • Size: 3 investigators
  • Agents: 3x team-debugger
  • Default hypotheses: 3 competing hypotheses
  • Use when: Bug has multiple plausible root causes

Feature Team

  • Size: 3 (1 lead + 2 implementers)
  • Agents: 1x team-lead + 2x team-implementer
  • Use when: Feature can be decomposed into parallel work streams

Fullstack Team

  • Size: 4 (1 lead + 3 implementers)
  • Agents: 1x team-lead + 1x frontend team-implementer + 1x backend team-implementer + 1x test team-implementer
  • Use when: Feature spans frontend, backend, and test layers

Read the full file on GitHub · 142 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 142 lines · 114 tokens per session scan B e158dd0e38d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

team-composition-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository wshobson/agents (39,318 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 1,750 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (reads agent configuration directories). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.