crew

crew

Build a crew of named, persona-driven Claude Code agents that persist memory, log their work, and reflect conversationally on accumulated experience.

What is a "crew"?

A crew is a small set of Claude Code agents you build for yourself, each with a distinct identity:

• A name (Interstellar-style by default — TARS, CASE, KIPP, PLEX — though custom names are first-class).
• A persona — focus areas, working style, anti-patterns, strong opinions.
• A directory tree at ~/.claude/agent-state/<name>/ for memory and activity logs.
• A subagent definition at ~/.claude/agents/<name>.md so other agents can delegate to it.
• A shell alias so you can start a top-level Claude session as that agent (tars, case, etc.).

The point isn't novelty — it's making generic roles concrete. "Software engineer" is too broad to be useful; TARS the SE who pushes for tests early on Go backends is a tool you can reach for. Names give you something to reason about ("can I delegate this to TARS?", "would CASE handle this differently?"), and the persistent state lets each crew member accumulate judgment over time.

Why crew?

Named identity makes delegation tangible. Generic subagents are stateless function calls. Crew members have a persona, history, and accumulated learnings — you can have a manager agent (CASE) that decides which crew member to delegate to, and the choice carries meaning beyond "an SE will do this."

Personalization at the role level. Two software engineers on a real team aren't interchangeable — one prefers TDD, one optimizes for ship velocity, one specializes in performance work. Crew lets you encode that distinction.

Persistence enables learning. Activity logs accumulate. Memory files grow. Reflection (/dream) finds patterns and discusses them with you in real time. Over weeks, a crew member's judgment sharpens in directions you've shaped through corrections — without you having to manually edit prompts every time.

Dual-mode invocation. Each crew member works two ways:

1. As a subagent — another agent delegates to them via the Agent tool.
2. As a top-level session — you type tars in a shell and converse directly.

Same persona file feeds both modes.

The two skills

/recruit

Creates a new crew member. Walks through naming (suggests Interstellar-style candidates, accepts custom names), persona elicitation (3–5 targeted questions about focus / style / anti-patterns), and full scaffolding: persona file, state directory tree, shell alias.

/dream <name>

Reflection cycle for a crew member. A subagent reads the accumulated activity log, existing memory, and prior dream-reflection blocks — then surfaces findings to you in chat, always with cited log evidence, never speculative. You walk them one at a time: apply (memory edit, persona refinement), refine then apply, or pass on with a one-line reason. A single ## Dream reflection block is appended to today's log recording what was applied and what was passed on; future dreams read that block to avoid re-surfacing the same patterns. No queue, no review step.

Lifecycle of a crew member

  /recruit ──→ persona + state dir + alias
                          │
                          ▼
              Sessions accumulate logs
              (top-level or as subagent)
                          │
                          ▼
                  /dream <name>
        subagent finds cited patterns
                          │
                          ▼
           conversation: apply / refine / pass
                          │
                          ▼
          single "## Dream reflection" block
          appended to today's log file
          (Applied: ... / Passed on: ... + reasons)
                          │
                          ▼
        next dream reads it, won't re-surface
        the same patterns

Installation

This plugin contains two skills. The crew member personas you create are personal and stay on your machine — they're not part of the plugin.

As a Claude Code plugin (recommended)

If you have a marketplace configured (see Claude Code plugin docs), add this repo as a source. Then enable in ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "enabledPlugins": {
    "crew@your-marketplace": true
  }
}

Local development / direct install

Clone this repo, then add to your shell rc file:

# Add to your existing CLAUDE_LOCAL_PLUGINS array, or create one:
CLAUDE_LOCAL_PLUGINS=(
  ~/work/crew-plugin
  # ...other plugins
)

_claude_plugin_flags() {
  local flags=""
  for p in "${CLAUDE_LOCAL_PLUGINS[@]}"; do
    flags+=" --plugin-dir $p"
  done
  echo "$flags"
}

alias c='claude $(_claude_plugin_flags)'

The plugin's skills load when you launch Claude with the --plugin-dir flag.

Without any plugin infrastructure

Symlink or copy the skills into ~/.claude/skills/: