CCG workflow
Seven role tools are available, each running a child agent on its own model with its own expert persona. This is how to chain them so the work converges instead of sprawling.
Skip all of this for small, obvious work. A one-line fix, a rename, a question you can answer by reading two files — do it yourself. Delegation buys depth, and it costs a round trip and a fresh context. Spend it only where depth is the thing you lack.
Picking a gear
Four modes. The user should not have to name one: read what they asked for, pick, say which you picked in a line, and — for anything past Direct — say what it costs and wait for a yes. They are paying per model call.
| Mode | For | Runs |
|---|---|---|
| Direct | a one-line fix, a rename, a question you can answer by reading | you, alone |
| Standard | an ordinary feature, a bug with a known cause, a contained refactor | design → build → review |
| Deep | a design with real alternatives, an unclear bug, a migration, anything expensive to get wrong | analyze → design → build → test → review |
| Team | work that splits across files and will keep developing | ccg_team — several specialists at once, each owning its own files |
A role holding several models answers with all of them at once, so Deep costs more than its phase count suggests — quote the real number of model calls, not the number of phases. If the user names a mode, run that one. If a phase changes what you believe, say so and re-pick rather than finishing a plan you no longer believe in.
Deep and Team are not a ranking. Deep buys certainty about one thing by asking several models about it. Team buys throughput on several things by running colleagues at once. A hard question is Deep even if it is small; a wide job is Team even if every part is easy. Something both hard and wide is Deep first — settle the design and the contracts — then Team to build it.
The loop
| Phase | Tool | Ends when |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Understand | ccg_analyze | you can state the constraints and the options with their trade-offs |
| 2. Design | ccg_design | the interfaces and the boundaries are settled |
| 3. Build | ccg_build | the code exists and its verify command passes |
| 4. Verify | ccg_review + the gates | findings are triaged and the criticals are gone |
Diagnose before you build when the cause is unknown (ccg_debug), and treat
ccg_optimize and ccg_test as phases of their own when the task is
performance or coverage rather than a feature.
Not every task needs four phases. A well-understood change is design → build → review. An investigation may be analyze → debug and stop there, with no code at all.
Writing a brief
A child sees none of this conversation. It gets your prompt and nothing else, so an under-specified brief is the main way this goes wrong. Every brief carries:
- The goal — one sentence on what the child must produce.
- The anchors — the exact files, symbols and commands it should start from. Paths, not descriptions.
- The constraints — what it must not change, the conventions to follow, the decisions already made (and by whom).
- The shape of the answer — a diff, a report, a ranked list. Say which.
Bad: "look at the auth code and improve it."
Good: "In src/auth/session.ts, the refresh path drops the CSRF token when a
retry follows a 401 (see refreshSession, lines 40-80). Diagnose the root
cause. Do not change code. Report ranked hypotheses with the minimal test that
would confirm each."
The quality gates
Bundled beside this skill, each runnable through the shell and each documenting its own arguments:
| Gate | Use it after |
|---|---|
verify-change | any change — analyses the diff and flags docs that drifted |
verify-quality | a complex or refactored module — complexity, duplication, naming, length |
verify-security | new modules, auth/crypto/input handling, anything touching secrets |
verify-module | a newly created module — structure and required docs |
gen-docs | creating a module — scaffolds its README and DESIGN |
They are deterministic scanners, not opinions: run them before ccg_review so
the reviewer spends its turn on judgement rather than on what a script already
knows. A gate's findings are input to your decision, not a verdict — a flagged
line can still be correct.
What stays with you
Delegate the turn, never the decision.
- Choosing between options is yours. A child ranks; you pick, and you own the reason.
- Acceptance is yours. Never let a child's "looks good" close a task. Read what came back and judge it — children are confident about work they cannot see the context of.
- Integration is yours. Children work in isolation; nothing but you is watching how the pieces meet.
- Contradictions are signal. When the analyzer and the reviewer disagree, that disagreement is the most valuable thing you have. Resolve it explicitly instead of averaging it away.
Running them in parallel
Independent delegations can run at once — a review of one module and tests for
another have nothing to say to each other. Wait (run_in_background: false)
only when your next move depends on the answer.
Do not parallelise work that writes to the same files. Two builders editing one module will produce a conflict nobody asked for; sequence those, or split the work along file boundaries first.
Running a team
ccg_team hires a role as a colleague instead of asking it a question: it stays
alive across turns, takes more work through send_message, and reports back on
its own. Use it when the job splits into substantial parts that do not wait on
each other and will keep developing. For a single question, the role's own tool
is cheaper.
Before hiring anything:
- Settle every shared contract. Teammates cannot see each other. Any
interface two of them meet at — a signature, a schema, an event name, a file
format — has to be decided and written into both briefs, or each will
invent a reasonable version and neither will fit. Read the code and pin the
contract down yourself; this is the step that decides whether the team works.
Record it with
ccg_rememberas you settle it — the next session should not have to re-derive it, and neither should you after a compaction. - Draw the file boundaries. Give every concurrent teammate a disjoint
ownsset. Two agents editing one file lose each other's work with no error. A hire that reaches into someone else's files is refused, naming the holder, so a refusal is a prompt to re-split the work — not an error to route around. - Say the roster and the cost, then wait for a yes.
ccg_roster is the durable answer to "who owns what". Read it whenever you are
unsure — after a compaction it is the only thing that still knows, and it is the
difference between routing a fix to its owner and quietly overwriting them.
While they work, do not sleep or poll — a report wakes you by itself, so ending your turn is how you wait, and it costs nothing. Say who is working on what and stop.
As reports land: read each one, integrate it, and route what it implies. A
teammate reporting a changed contract is the signal to send_message whoever
depends on it. When integration turns up a fault in a file a live teammate owns,
send it back to them rather than fixing it quietly — they still think they own
that file, and their next assignment would overwrite you. Take a file back only
by saying so.
Then verify the whole yourself: run the thing end to end, check the contract that every part was supposed to honour, and review the assembled result. No teammate can see the seam it was built against.
What to write down
ccg_remember puts one thing in .ccg/memory.md, which loads itself into every
later session in this workspace. Use it the moment something is settled that
would otherwise be re-argued:
| Kind | Write it when |
|---|---|
decision | you chose between real alternatives — record the reason and what you rejected, or it can only be obeyed, never revisited |
contract | two parts must agree: a signature, a schema, an event name, a file format |
convention | this project does something in a way a newcomer would guess wrong |
gotcha | something looks fine and is not |
Not a log of what happened. The transcript is that already, and a memory that fills with narration stops being worth loading. If you find a note is wrong or out of date, say so and fix the file — a stale note does more damage than a missing one.
