Building Agent Team Prompts

Overview

Agent team prompts must be self-contained — teammates don't inherit your conversation history. Every piece of context a teammate needs must be in their spawn prompt or discoverable from the codebase.

Core principle: A good agent team prompt specifies WHO does WHAT on WHICH files, HOW they communicate, and WHEN they're done.

Before You Build the Prompt

Verify the task actually benefits from an agent team:

• Multiple independent workstreams (review, research, non-overlapping implementation)
• Competing hypotheses that benefit from parallel investigation
• Cross-layer work where each layer is independently ownable

Don't use agent teams for: sequential tasks, work concentrated in a few files, or simple tasks where coordination overhead exceeds benefit. Use subagents or a single session instead.

Prompt Template