teams-tool

Spawn persistent teammate sessions that share a task board and can message each other directly — no hub-and-spoke bottleneck through the orchestrator. Live teammates are in-process; archived teams are persisted to disk so team_resume survives restarts.

Dashboard workspace

The teams dashboard gives you a live workspace for active teams: a left tree for team/member navigation plus teammate status cards with current task, model, last tool, live token meters (↑ input, ↓ output), and a rolling 5-line output preview. Updates stream as team state changes, and teammates keep running while the dashboard is open.

Dashboard rendering follows shared presentation roles: identity/action context is emphasized, while output/feed chatter is shown with lower visual weight.

Toggle

Input	Action
`/team-dashboard`	Toggle dashboard on/off
`/team-dashboard on`	Enable dashboard
`/team-dashboard off`	Disable dashboard
`/team-dashboard status`	Show dashboard status
`Ctrl+X`	Toggle dashboard on/off

Controls

Key	Action
`↑` / `↓` or `j` / `k`	Move selection in the left tree
`Tab` / `Shift+Tab`	Cycle teams
`PgUp` / `PgDn`	Scroll teammate cards by page
`Ctrl+U` / `Ctrl+D`	Scroll teammate cards by half page
Mouse wheel / trackpad scroll	Scroll teammate cards
`Esc`	Close dashboard and return to chat

V1 note: The dashboard is currently in-process only. It reflects the current tallow runtime and does not preserve UI focus/selection state across restarts.

Tools

Orchestrator tools (available to you):

team_create — create a named team
team_add_tasks — add tasks with optional blockedBy dependencies
team_spawn — spawn a teammate with a role, model, tool set, and optional agent template
team_send — send a message (fire-and-forget or wait for response)
team_status — view task board, teammate states, recent messages
team_shutdown — abort all teammates and archive the team
team_resume — restore an archived team (omit name to list archives)

Teammate tools (injected into each spawned agent):

team_tasks — list, claim, complete, or fail tasks (only the assignee can complete/fail a claimed task)
team_message — send messages to other teammates
team_inbox — check for unread messages

Auto-dispatch

When a teammate completes a task, the extension automatically checks for newly unblocked tasks and idle teammates. If a match exists, the idle teammate is woken and assigned the task immediately — no orchestrator polling needed.

This means dependency chains like A → B → C resolve automatically. Teammates claim parallel work, complete it, and the blocked downstream task dispatches to whoever goes idle first.

Archive and Resume

Shutting down a team — whether via team_shutdown or session end — archives the team instead of deleting it. The task board, results, and messages are preserved on disk, so team_resume can restore them in a later session after a restart.

Call team_resume to restore an archived team. The restored team has no teammates (their sessions are gone), so spawn fresh ones to pick up where you left off. Any tasks that were claimed when the team was archived are reset to pending.

Call team_resume with no arguments to list all available archives with task summaries.

Message retention

Team chat logs use ring-buffer retention so long-running teams do not accumulate unbounded message history in memory.

newest messages are retained
oldest messages are evicted when the retention cap is exceeded
unread/read checks continue to work on retained messages only

Tuning knobs

Env var	Default	Effect
`TALLOW_TEAMS_MESSAGE_RETENTION_LIMIT`	`256`	per-team message cap before oldest entries are evicted
`TALLOW_TEAMS_KEEP_FULL_HISTORY`	unset	set to `1` to disable trimming (debug mode)

Escape behavior

Inside the dashboard, Esc closes the dashboard and returns you to chat. It does not kill teammates or archive teams.

Use team_shutdown when you want to stop teammates and archive the team explicitly. Session shutdown still archives active teams automatically.