crew-hire

Run by the lead. $CREW is ~/.claude/agent-crew. The lead proposes; the user approves in one line; only then is anything written.

When to hire

Hire only on evidence, never on a hunch:

• the lead pasted the same 300+ words of instructions into 3 or more briefs; or
• a class of failure keeps slipping through (the reviewer or CI finds the same kind of bug again).

State the evidence in the proposal (which briefs, which failures).

The ladder: use the cheapest rung that works

1. Role addendum: a file .claude/team/roles/<agent>.md with extra rules for an agent that already exists (every agent reads its own addendum). Best for project-specific rules.
2. Skill: a SKILL.md for a procedure that several agents or sessions repeat. Put it in .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (project) or ~/.claude/skills/ (every project).
3. New agent: only if the job needs its own tools, model or isolation that no existing agent has. First look in $CREW/catalog/ (tester, ui-reviewer, security-reviewer, docs-writer, perf-profiler); copy it unchanged instead of writing a new one.

Limits

• At most 7 active agents. Over the limit: retire one first (crew-retire).
• One-line description, written as when to use it.
• A new agent starts as trial in roster.md and is judged after 3 uses (kept or retired).

Steps

1. Write the proposal to the user in at most 6 lines: what, which rung, the evidence, the model and effort, the retire criterion. Wait for a one-line OK.
2. Do it:
   • addendum or skill: write the file (addenda are under .claude/team/, which the lead may write; a project skill is a coder job);
   • catalog agent: the coder copies $CREW/catalog/<name>.md unchanged to .claude/agents/<name>.md (give it the path); the lead does not write there;
   • new agent: the coder writes .claude/agents/<name>.md from your brief (frontmatter: name, one-line description, tools, model, effort).
3. Add the row to roster.md (why, evidence, status trial, uses 0, retire criterion) and a row to routing.md if the agent has its own job type.
4. Run check-team.ps1 -Project .. Update state.md Index if useful.