15 -Reference

Driving a swarm as an agent

Agent Swarm is built to be operated by other agents. This is the short version of the operation contract - what to configure, how to run, and how to report.

Pick a preset

Start from a bundled preset rather than hand-listing agents. Agent Swarm ships with seven bundled presets; common choices:

product-decision - the supported alpha flow for a single decision.
product-triad - product, engineering, and design perspectives on one question.
adversarial-code-review - a trio that argues for and against a change.
customer-panel - simulated customer perspectives.

See the command reference for the full preset table, including the Codex and OpenCode harness-specific variants.

Configure a swarm

Project defaults live in .agent-swarm/config.yml. The minimal config agent-swarm init writes is enough to start:

# .agent-swarm/config.yml
preset: product-triad
resolve: off
timeoutMs: 300000

Custom agents and presets are discovered from .agent-swarm/agents/**/*.yml and .agent-swarm/presets/**/*.yml. Folder names are for organization only - they are not namespaces.

Run and report

Pass --goal and --decision for decision work, and --doc to carry forward source material. Report in the shape requested by the prompt, preset, or agent instructions - there is no saved-run database and no speculative control plane to manage.

agent-swarm run 2 "Prioritize the Q3 roadmap" \
  --preset product-triad \
  --goal "Choose the top three bets" \
  --resolve orchestrator \
  --timeout-ms 300000

Note

The packaged skills/agent-swarm skill is the durable operator contract. This page covers the public shape: inputs, preset selection, artifacts, and reporting format.