Maestro Mode & squads
Maestro Mode lets one agent build and run a team: recruit peers, brief them, wire them together and follow their progress. It is off by default and switched on by a human click.
The rule that makes it safe
Every action the maestro takes opens an editable approval card before anything happens on the canvas. Recruiting an agent, wiring two peers, dismissing a finished one — each stops at a card you can edit, approve or reject.
The team organises itself. You stay the one who says yes.
The commands
catenary maestro status # recruits and remaining slots
catenary maestro recruit 2 claude-code "Write tests for src/auth"
catenary maestro connect "Claude 1" "Claude 2" # wire two recruits together
catenary maestro dismiss "Claude 2" # close a finished recruit
The objective passed to recruit becomes the new agent's opening prompt. Later instructions go through catenary ask.
Dismiss a recruit as soon as its objective is done — an idle agent still holds a slot.
The workflow
- Survey.
catenary listandcatenary maestro status— who exists, what is free. - Evaluate. Trivial work stays with the maestro. Parallelisable work gets delegated.
- Delegate.
recruitfor new hands,askfor peers already on the canvas. - Review.
checkto follow without interrupting;dismissto clean up.
Helper limits
| Plan | Helpers |
|---|---|
| Free | 2 |
| Pro | 5, adjustable between 2 and 10 |
Squads
A squad is a saved formation: roles, agent presets and the wires between them. Load one and the whole team appears already connected and already briefed with its role prompt.
Five squads ship built in — among them Fullstack Duo, TDD Autonomous Squad, Fullstack Trio, Security & Code Review Squad and Enterprise Full Squad, which puts a Maestro over a Backend, a Frontend, a QA Tester and a Code Reviewer.
Every squad has exactly one leader, and the formation — leader on top, team in a row beneath — is derived when the squad loads, so nothing is hand-placed.
Loading a squad spends the same helper budget as recruiting by hand, so the plan decides which ones fit: Free loads the four squads of up to three agents, and the five-agent Enterprise Full Squad needs Pro.
Building your own is unlimited on Pro: pick the roles, name them whatever your team calls them, and save.