Teams

A team is a self-contained, portable unit of coordinated AI work. It bundles a set of specialist roles, a workflow that orchestrates them, and optional agent definitions into a single directory you can build once, share with anyone, and assemble into any project.

That’s the cliq philosophy: define the how once, then just bring the what. A team encodes an entire methodology — who does what, in what order, with what quality gates — so the only thing that changes from run to run is the requirement you feed it.

Teams can model any domain: engineering, product discovery, content production, research, incident response, or anything else that benefits from coordinated specialists working in sequence or parallel.

What’s in a Team

A team is a directory containing everything needed to run the pipeline:

my-team/
├── team.yml              # Team definition — workflow, metadata, agents
├── roles/                # One markdown file per phase
│   ├── architect.md
│   ├── developer.md
│   └── reviewer.md
├── agents/               # (optional) Bundled custom agent code
│   └── analyst/
│       └── index.js
└── README.md             # (optional) Documentation

team.yml defines the phases and how they connect. Each file in roles/ is an agent’s playbook — identity, responsibilities, boundaries, workflow steps. See Roles for the full anatomy, and Workflows & Phases for phase types, commands, and the gate verdict loop.

Scopes

Teams are organized by scope — a namespace prefix like @cliq or @local. Scopes keep teams from different sources separated so names don’t collide. A team’s full reference is @scope/name, for example @cliq/hello-world or @local/blog-pipeline.

Scope	Purpose	How teams get there
`@local`	Your personal teams	`cliq team create`, `cliq builder generate` — teams created here; `cliq team copy` writes to a local directory for later install
`@cliq`	Official teams	`cliq team install hub://@cliq/...` downloads here
`@yourname`	Your shared scope	Create teams with `cliq team new @yourname/team-a`, or install from CliqHub
Other `@*`	Community / org teams	`cliq team install hub://@publisher/team` downloads here

@local is reserved — it’s always present after cliq setup, and teams in it cannot be published to CliqHub. Everything else is a publisher namespace.

The global registry

cliq setup creates ~/.cliqrc/, which is the global home directory. Inside it, ~/.cliqrc/teams/ is the default registry — the first place cliq looks for teams:

~/.cliqrc/
├── settings.json                 # global settings (runtime, integrations, hub, hug, etc.)
├── cliq.id                       # global instance identifier
└── teams/
    ├── @local/                   # your personal teams
    │   └── blog-pipeline/
    ├── @cliq/                    # official teams (installed from CliqHub)
    │   ├── hello-world/
    │   └── feature-dev-js/
    └── @yourcompany/             # teams from other publishers
        └── ...

How Assembly Works

When you run cliq assemble @cliq/hello-world, cliq resolves the team (finds it on disk), copies its workflow and role files into the project’s .cliq/ directory, and validates everything. After assembly, the project is self-contained — cliq run reads only from .cliq/, not from the registry. You could delete the registry entirely and the assembled project would still run.

This means you can assemble a team on your laptop, push the project (with .cliq/ committed or carried along), and run it on a CI server that doesn’t have the team registry at all.

CliqHub

CliqHub is the public registry for cliq teams. Browse, discover, and install ready-made teams from the community — or publish your own.

To install and use teams from CliqHub, see Team Installation.
To build and publish teams to CliqHub, see Team Development.

Build Your Own

There are three ways to create a custom team: copy an existing team, generate one with Builder, or build from scratch. All paths produce a team under @local/ (e.g. ~/.cliqrc/teams/@local/my-team/).

See Team Development for the complete guide — including tutorials, the Builder, versioning, publishing, and the Cliq SDK.