Tribe

Tribe turns ad-hoc parallel agent work into a small, inspectable repository protocol. It helps the root agent study a project, derive durable responsibility boundaries, assign bounded work, and integrate the result while keeping the rules and state beside the code.

Quick start

To install Tribe into the current repository, give the agent the initialization guide from the public source: https://gitlab.com/EternalLion67/tribe/-/raw/main/docs/INITIALIZATION.md. It installs the reusable skill into the Codex environment and the project-local protocol into the current repository. The skill can also be installed separately with curl -fsSL https://gitlab.com/EternalLion67/tribe/-/raw/main/install.sh | sh.

After installation, start a fresh session inside the target project and say Use Tribe in this project. That is the activation switch. An ordinary request to run several agents does not install persistent project files.

Installation and the local pack

Installation adds a managed block to AGENTS.md and a .agents/ directory. The pack contains the protocol map, coordination and ownership rules, technical responsibility boundaries, current state, accepted decisions, known issues, a workstream ledger, handoff templates, and an evidence policy. These local files become the authority for future sessions instead of chat history, global memory, or another repository.

Roles come from stable architecture and recurring ownership boundaries. For larger work, Tribe supports layered authority: root owns integration and release, an architecture owner maintains contracts, a workstream manager owns one stream’s trajectory, and implementers and reviewers stay within explicit contours.

How the work proceeds

The root agent first reads the instructions, state, and worktree. During installation, the initialization guide requires separate discovery and acceptance assignments when useful slots are available. In ordinary work, independent assignments map architecture and delivery boundaries, after which the root derives the smallest useful set of technical responsibility boundaries. Each implementation contour has one active writer; research and review remain read-only unless another contour is explicitly assigned to them.

Before integration, a separate acceptance pass reviews the pack as a system: template completeness, unresolved links and tokens, responsibility-boundary consistency, preservation of existing rules, and the absence of secrets or personal context. scripts/validate_project.py checks observable structure, references, markers, and role hygiene, but it does not replace the project’s engineering tests.

Scope and boundaries

Tribe is an opt-in coordination protocol, not an autonomous service, hosted control plane, or authorization system. It does not replace project engineering rules, human review, security policy, release controls, or separate authorization for publication and deployment. The pre-0.1 contract may change incompatibly between minor revisions.

The repository uses python3 scripts/stage_templates.py to prepare a neutral scaffold. Then python3 scripts/materialize_templates.py performs a --dry-run followed by one guarded write of the complete project pack. After installation, python3 scripts/validate_project.py validates the result. The scripts support Python 3.13–3.14 and use only the standard library. The validator checks observable structure, references, markers, tokens, and role hygiene, but it cannot prove product behavior; the maintainer still decides whether to accept the changes.

The project is released under the MIT license. The source and current instructions are available in the Tribe repository on GitLab.