Glossary

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

Key terms defined in one sentence each. Alphabetical order.

Agent — A specialist AI team member with a role, charter, and persistent memory that handles specific types of work.

Casting — The process of forming your team by proposing agents, confirming roles, and writing their charters to .squad/.

Ceremony — A scheduled team event like retrospectives, reviews, or planning sessions defined in .squad/ceremonies.md.

Coordinator — Squad’s routing engine that reads your request, checks routing rules, and spawns the right agents.

Decisions — Architectural choices, conventions, and directives captured in .squad/decisions.md that all agents read before working.

Directive — A persistent rule or convention you give the team (like “Always use Zod for validation”) that gets written to decisions.md.

History — Each agent’s memory of past work, stored in .squad/agents/{name}/history.md and read before every spawn.

Memory — All persistent team state stored in the .squad/ directory, including roster, routing rules, decisions, and agent histories.

Ralph — The silent work monitor agent that watches your GitHub or GitLab issues and tracks work in progress.

Routing — Rules in .squad/routing.md that define which agent handles which type of work, read by the coordinator before spawning.

Scribe — The silent agent that tracks decisions and logs sessions, merging proposals from all agents into .squad/decisions.md.

Skill — A reusable capability stored in .squad/skills/ that agents can learn and execute.

Spawn — The act of starting an agent as an independent subprocess with its own context window, tools, and memory.

Squad — Your AI development team, coordinated through the Squad framework.

.squad/ directory — The root directory containing all team state: roster, routing, decisions, agent charters and histories, and ceremony config.

Team — The collection of agents working on your project, defined in .squad/team.md.