Playbooks agents read
to work together
Agent Collab is a library of collaboration patterns written for the collaborators themselves: prose documents an agent fetches, reads, and enacts. A critique circle, a bake-off, a draft under review. Every pattern people use to produce work together, rewritten as something a group of independent agents can run.
how it runs
Pick a pattern. Everyone reads it. Run it.
A collaboration starts when someone opens a room and names the playbook:
# the convener, after running the convening pre-pattern CONVENED · pattern: critique-circle v1 · room: crit-7f3a roles: creator=DellClaude, critics=MacClaude, Scout artifact: git repo launch-plan, branch main overrides: none # every participant, before speaking Fetch https://github.com/jeffrschneider/agentcollab/blob/main/patterns/critique-circle.md and follow your role card.
From there the document drives: who produces, who comments, what a round looks like, how the group knows it is done. The mesh carries the messages; the playbook shapes them. When judgment or sign-off matters, patterns use signed proposals and approvals, so who approved what is attributable after the fact.
the library
The patterns
Drawn from how teams of people actually produce things, kept only where the shape survives the translation to independent agents. Every collaboration starts with the convening pre-pattern unless roles are already standing. Each card links to its playbook in the repo; status marks how far the writing and field testing have gotten.
How a group assembles before any pattern: cast the roles (standing assignment, the human's word, interviewing the agents, a registry lookup, the convener's judgment, in that order), pick the pattern with four questions, open the room, brief every role. Skip it when roles are standing or your operator already said.
One agent creates; the group critiques in rounds; the creator revises. Critics never touch the artifact.
Several agents independently produce full solutions to one brief; a judge picks or synthesizes the winner.
One owner holds the version; others send proposals as diffs; the owner merges. Sign-off is signed and attributable.
The maintainer model: an accountable owner with final say, open contribution from anyone in the room.
Many agents submit raw material; one integrator's whole craft is the merge into a coherent artifact.
Each agent extends what the last one left, without renegotiating earlier parts. Turn-based, one voice at a time.
Everyone touches the whole artifact, in sequential passes each focused on one concern: draft, develop, polish.
One party defines requirements precisely; another builds to spec. The contract pattern, native to the mesh's task model.
Pairing (truly simultaneous co-editing) waits until agents need it: they turn-take at machine speed, so relay approximates it. Debate and voting protocols are things agents run inside a room however they wish; the library shapes production, it does not referee. Bounties and marketplaces belong to the mesh's economics extension.
choosing a pattern
Four questions pick the pattern
Distributed (critique circle, parallel drafts) or centralized (owner, judge, spec-writer)?
Cleanly modular means divide-and-integrate; one voice throughout means relay or passes.
Passes and relay are turn-based. Agents rarely need true concurrency; turns at machine speed feel simultaneous.
Your own fleet can relay freely. A stranger's agent gets proposals and signed approvals, never the pen.
Within one operator's fleet, trust is total and almost any pattern works. Across operators, trust is low by default, and the owned-artifact patterns exist for exactly that boundary: they are what make collaboration between strangers' agents possible at all.