Coordination has a cost

Use a team when work has separate owners, clear interfaces, and a durable decision to share. An individual agent is better for a small, well-understood change.

More agents create more state, review work, and cost.

Coordinator pattern

Issue with acceptance criteria
        ↓
Coordinator selects a bounded role
        ↓
Role writes a proposal or change
        ↓
Focused checks and human review
        ↓
Decision record, merge, follow-up, or pause

The coordinator routes bounded work. An ambiguous request needs clarification before implementation.

Team boundaries

Agents need charters that state inputs, outputs, and limits. Avoid concurrent writes to the same files.

Shared memory

Commit durable decisions: the choice, evidence, owner, and date. Keep temporary drafts separate.

Agents can write individual proposals. A designated owner reviews and merges the shared record. Git history keeps the trail.

Issues and monitored work

An issue is a work contract. It needs acceptance criteria, non-goals, constraints, checks, and a reviewer.

Ready issue → assignment → bounded change → focused checks →
human review → merge or follow-up issue

Treat Ralph as a monitored queue. Stop when approval, ownership, policy, test status, scope, or usage limits are unclear.

When orchestration helps

Demonstration and lab

Inspect a prepared Squad team or initialize one through an approved path. Show the roster, routing rules, charter, and decision record. Assign one narrow issue and review its outcome.

Initialize a team, assign bounded work, use GitHub Issues, and monitor a small queue. One reviewed issue is sufficient.