Glossary

Agent — a Markdown file defining a specialized role for Claude Code. Shipped as part of a team. Lives in agents/ in a team repo; symlinked into .claude/agents/ in a project.

atl — the CLI (atl install, atl list, …). Installs teams into a project. Go binary.

Cache — the shared on-disk directory where atl stores cloned team repos. One per machine: ~/.claude/repos/agentteamland/. Projects symlink into it.

Children pattern — a convention for complex agents: top-level agent.md stays short (identity, scope, principles); detailed knowledge lives as topic-per-file under children/.

Circular chain — when a team's extends chain loops back on itself (A → B → A). Detected at install time; the CLI fails with the full chain printed.

Dependencies — additional teams a team requires, specified via the dependencies field in team.json. Resolved and installed at the same time as the team itself.

excludes — list in team.json of parent-provided agent/skill/rule names that the child does not want symlinked. Takes effect after the parent is installed.

extends — single-parent inheritance. A team with extends: "parent@^1.0.0" installs the parent first and layers its own content on top.

Override — when a child team ships an item with the same name as a parent's item, the child's version wins. Full replace, no merging.

Project — a directory you run atl in. Gets a .claude/ subdirectory populated with symlinks to installed teams.

Registry — the public catalog of teams. A single teams.json file at agentteamland/registry. PR-driven, schema-validated.

Rule — a Markdown file that's always loaded by Claude Code (unlike skills, which must be invoked). Shipped as part of a team in rules/; symlinked into .claude/rules/.

Scaffolder — team-scoped skill named /create-new-project that bootstraps a new project on the team's stack. Must follow the Scaffolder spec.

SemVer constraint — version range syntax used in extends and dependencies. ^1.0.0 (caret), ~1.2.0 (tilde), 1.2.3 (exact), >=1.2.0 (open-ended).

Skill — a user-invocable slash command (e.g. /verify-system). Shipped as a directory with skill.md at its root. Global skills live in ~/.claude/skills/; team-scoped skills ship with a team and appear in .claude/skills/ after install.

Status — a team's state in the registry: verified, community, or deprecated.

Team — a Git repository with team.json at its root, bundling agents, skills, and rules for a specific kind of work.

team.json — the manifest file at the root of every team repo. Declares name, version, description, what's bundled, what's extended, what's excluded.

Workspace — agentteamland/workspace, the maintainer hub repo where all peer repos are aggregated for development. Not needed to use AgentTeamLand; only relevant if you're contributing to the platform itself.