CC BY 4.0 — Dinis Cruz, with AI co-authorship (Claude, Anthropic). Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners is Simon Wardley's model, credited and linked, never reproduced. This page as markdown.
The reference for setting up agentic teams with more than one role — not what each role can do, but how nineteen of them are composed into a team that hands work off instead of one generalist doing everything nine times.
Measured from Dinis Cruz's own
product team, SG/Send: 39 ROLE.md files, 19 unique role names, four team
instantiations, 130 comms files and 4,335 commits searched — 7 September 2026.
Every number below is computed from
data/roster.json on every build, not typed —
06__ of the pack requires it, because a
role count typed by a person is the first thing that goes stale the moment a
ROLE.md lands or a role is retired.
Explorer, Villager and Town Planner are the same role names, staffed with different mandates — Wardley's Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners, implemented as agent configurations rather than drawn as a diagram. As far as the commissioning pack can determine, nobody else has published this.
17 role directories, 13 defined. The governing rule is discover.
The topologies →17 directories, 17 defined — the only complete team. "Harden, do not build." If a redesign is needed, send it back.
The handback rule →4 directories, 3 defined — a sketch, not a template. Financial models wrapped in investor narrative.
Read it as a sketch →An LLM given a task will attempt it. Capability is not the constraint — willingness is — and two fields in the format are what convert a capable generalist into a specialist that hands off.
The explicit exclusion list. A role without one is not a role — without it, every role silently becomes the same role.
The format, in full →"If a piece of knowledge exists in this repo but cannot be found in under 30 seconds, the Librarian has failed." Checkable. The newer table format lost this.
The drift, quantified →A role's definition names the directories it reads and writes. A new occupant of a role knows its inbox and outbox without being told.
The comms protocol →A memory site that edits its own past teaches agents to do the same — so the honest parts are published as content, not footnotes.
Six older roles state their claim as a falsifiable failure. Seven newer ones state it descriptively — true, but not checkable. The migration improved the markup and lost the property that made the field valuable.
Read the drift →advocate, alchemist, ambassador and sherpa have a directory in Explorer with no
ROLE.md inside it; accountant and translator are defined elsewhere
with no identity fields extracted. Published as gaps, never filled in for this
website.
A ROLE.md shows what a role is today. The history shows what went
wrong badly enough that someone wrote a rule into it.
Everything above is reference. This is the deliverable: which six roles to start with, what each exclusion list must say, where the comms tree goes, and when to split into Explorer and Villager.
CC BY 4.0 — Dinis Cruz, with AI co-authorship (Claude, Anthropic). Pioneers–Settlers–Town Planners is Simon Wardley's model, credited and linked, never reproduced. This page as markdown.