Tips & Tricks

⚠️ Experimental — Squad is alpha software. APIs, commands, and behavior may change between releases.

Try this:

Team, build the login feature — include UI, API endpoints, and tests

Patterns that make Squad click. Skim the headers, steal what’s useful.

The Big Three

Say “team” for parallel work. The word “team” triggers fan-out — frontend, backend, testing, all at once.

Name an agent for focused work. "Dallas, fix the login bug" sends work to one specific agent. No team overhead.

Set rules early. First session, drop your conventions into a directive. Agents read decisions.md before every task — you only say things once.

Write Better Prompts

❌ "Build the auth system"
✅ "Build JWT auth for login/logout/refresh. Redis sessions. 
   Bcrypt passwords. No OAuth yet — that's phase 2."

Be specific about scope. Tell the team what’s in, what’s out, what’s next. Use bullet points for multi-part tasks — agents process lists better than paragraphs.

Direct vs Team vs General

Parallel Work — Let It Cook

Don’t interrupt parallel work. Squad agents chain automatically — the tester catches failures, the backend fixes them, the tester re-runs. If you jump in after 2 minutes, you break the chain.

When they’re done, ask Scribe:

What did the team just do?

Ralph — Your Work Monitor

Got a backlog? Let Ralph handle it while you focus on the critical path.

Ralph, start monitoring

Ralph triages issues, assigns them, spawns agents, and reports every 3-5 rounds. Say "Ralph, idle" to stop.

The squad-heartbeat workflow runs Ralph on a schedule — your squad works even when you’re offline.

Decisions & Memory

• Set permanent rules: "Always use TypeScript strict mode" → goes to decisions.md
• Capture lessons: "Never include passwords in API responses" → agents remember forever
• Check alignment: When agents disagree, the decision is probably missing. Add it.
• Commit .squad/ — it’s your team’s brain. Anyone who clones gets the full team.

Common Pitfalls