# teams.sgit.ai — roles are boundaries > **Roles are boundaries. The Conductor never does the work.** 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](about/index.html) 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.* *Source: · site v0.1.0 · markdown twin of the front page.* --- ## What exists, measured Every number here is computed from [`data/roster.json`](data/roster.json) on every build, not typed. 19 unique role names across four team instantiations. 6 carry a **falsifiable** central claim — the recommended, older form. 7 carry a **descriptive** claim — true, but not checkable. 6 have **no Core Mission or Central Claim recorded** and are published as gaps. 6 form the **portable core** — reached for twice, independently, when the estate stood up a second product. ## The finding 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. - **Explorer** — build the new thing. 17 role directories, 13 defined. The governing rule is *discover*. [The topologies →](topologies/index.html) - **Villager** — harden what exists. 17 directories, 17 defined — the only complete team. *"Harden, do not build."* If a redesign is needed, send it back to Explorer. - **Town Planner** — industrialise and capitalise. 4 directories, 3 defined — a sketch, not a template. Financial models wrapped in investor narrative. ## What makes it a team, not one agent nine times 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. - **`Not Responsible For`** — 31 of 39 files. The explicit exclusion list. A role without one is not a role. [The format, in full →](role-format/index.html#exclusions) - **The Central Claim, as a failure condition** — 6 of 39 files. *"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 →](role-format/index.html#claim) - **Addresses, not messages** — 130 comms files. A role's definition names the directories it reads and writes, so a new occupant knows its inbox and outbox without being told. [The comms protocol →](comms/index.html) ## What this site does not smooth over A memory site that edits its own past teaches agents to do the same — so the honest parts are published as content, not footnotes. - **A regression.** 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. - **Six roles carry no recorded Core Mission or Central Claim.** advocate, alchemist, ambassador and sherpa have an empty directory in Explorer; accountant and translator are marked defined elsewhere with no identity fields extracted from that file. Town Planner's librarian directory is a fifth, separate empty case. Published as gaps, never filled in for this website. [See where they exist →](roster/index.html) - **Learnings recovered from diffs, not files.** A `ROLE.md` shows what a role is today. The history shows what went wrong badly enough that someone wrote a rule into it. [Three learnings →](evolution/index.html) ## Build one Everything above is reference. [The assembly guide](setup/index.html) 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. Or [read the source pack first](documents/index.html). --- 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.