Agent Team Operation

Two Modes

• Standalone — one agent working alone outside Herdr. HERDR_ENV is unset
• Herdr team round — a nonworking foreman dispatching separate worker panes. HERDR_ENV is set
• Read HERDR_ENV to tell the modes apart
• Never infer the mode from how large or careful the task is
• Every section of skills/herdr-foreman/references/team-operation.md governs a Herdr team round only
• In standalone mode none of it applies — no roles, no rotation, no briefs, no report files, no worktree-per-writer, no judge seat
• A standalone agent does the task directly
• A standalone agent never simulates the roles, the briefs, or the reports
• Standalone work is still governed by every other rule in this plugin

Runtime Dialogs

• Both modes follow skills/herdr-foreman/references/herdr.md Runtime Dialogs

Delegation

• Authorized delegated work uses Herdr-managed agents through the existing foreman owners
• This section governs both modes and every role, including nested delegation and read-only research or review
• Native subagent, spawn, task and team mechanisms are forbidden delegation routes
• The prohibition covers invocation through tools, skills or CLI wrappers
• Claude Code, Codex CLI and other supported runtimes remain valid workers inside Herdr
• Role-specific delegation prohibitions and independence constraints remain binding
• An unmanaged agent's output never substitutes for a required Herdr report
• When Herdr or an eligible worker is unavailable, follow the existing recovery and escalation route
• Outside a Herdr round the requesting agent retains ownership of an unavailable delegation route
• An unavailable route never authorizes native fallback
• Team-round direct work stays within the current role's authority
• Standalone direct work follows every other applicable rule
• Team-round staffing and worker requests follow skills/herdr-foreman/references/team-operation.md Delegation

Foreman Role

• This section governs a Herdr team round only
• The foreman is a nonworking foreman
• It assigns the work
• It supervises the crew
• It accepts or rejects what the crew delivers
• In a team round the foreman dispatches the task work and never executes it itself
• The foreman's own execution covers reading the shared checkout, this plugin's owner scripts, and the foreman-owned records those scripts write
• Foreman-owned records are the task ledger, retrospective notes, attention items, and working memory
• A request whose answer is a task deliverable is dispatched, whatever its size, and whether or not the foreman already knows the answer
• A task deliverable is a written artifact, a recommendation, an assessment, or a repository edit, other than a foreman-owned record
• A request the foreman could answer only after a lookup, a file inspection, or research is dispatched
• Narrow exception for a bounded factual lookup.
• Applies to a read-only fact answer with no durable deliverable or substantive judgment
• Preconditions are binding: read skills/herdr-foreman/references/team-operation.md Bounded Factual Lookup before relying on it
• Every other lookup follows the dispatch requirement
• A bounded question routes to a specialist consultation under Team Composition
• A review of code already pushed for the task routes to the reviewer responsibility under Review Before PR
• A review of any other existing code routes to a read-only consultation under Specialist Consultations
• A repository edit routes to the developer responsibility under Writers and Checkouts
• A shortfall of eligible workers is a staffing decision to record under Team Composition, never authorization for the foreman to execute

Team Round Contract

• A Herdr team round follows skills/herdr-foreman/references/team-operation.md in full
• That file is a must-read before any team-round action outside Bounded Factual Lookup
• Its sections bind a team round as rule content
• The foreman loads it through skills/herdr-foreman/SKILL.md
• Every worker brief names it as a required read
• A section this rule names without a path (Team Composition, Review Before PR, Specialist Consultations, Writers and Checkouts) lives in that file