Ceremonies

Try this to schedule team ceremonies:

Schedule a daily standup at 9am and a sprint retro every Friday

Try this to trigger a pre-work design review:

Run a design review before we start the authentication rebuild

Ceremonies are structured team meetings that happen at key moments — before multi-agent work begins, or after something goes wrong. Squad runs them automatically when needed.

Built-in Ceremonies

Design Review

Triggers automatically before multi-agent tasks involving 2+ agents modifying shared systems.

The Lead facilitates. Each relevant agent is spawned to weigh in on interfaces, risks, and contracts before work begins.

> Team, rebuild the authentication system

📋 Design Review completed — facilitated by Ripley
   Decisions: 3 | Action items: 4
   Agreed on JWT format, session storage strategy, and endpoint contracts

Retrospective

Triggers automatically after build failures, test failures, or reviewer rejections.

The Lead facilitates a focused root-cause analysis.

📋 Retrospective completed — facilitated by Ripley
   Decisions: 2 | Action items: 3
   Root cause: missing null check in API response parser

Manual Triggers

Run any ceremony on demand:

> Run a retro
> Run a design meeting

Managing Ceremonies

Create a new ceremony

> Add a ceremony for code reviews

Disable a ceremony

> Disable retros

The ceremony stays in ceremonies.md but won’t auto-trigger.

Skip a ceremony once

> Skip the design review for this task

The ceremony remains enabled for future tasks.

Summary

Tips

• Design reviews prevent agents from building conflicting implementations. Let them run on multi-agent tasks.
• Retros produce decisions that get written to decisions.md — they improve future work, not just diagnose the current failure.
• Ceremony config lives in .ai-team/ceremonies.md. You can edit it directly if you prefer.
• Ceremonies work well with human team members — add a human as a participant for approval gates.

Sample Prompts

run a design review before we start

Manually triggers a design review ceremony for the current task.

run a retro on why those tests failed

Starts a retrospective to analyze test failures and capture learnings.

add a ceremony for security reviews

Creates a custom ceremony type with its own triggers and participants.

skip the design review for this quick fix

Bypasses the design review ceremony for the current task only.

disable automatic retros

Turns off auto-triggering for retrospectives while keeping the ceremony defined.