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Your First Team

This guide walks you through setting up a team with specialist members.

Prerequisites

  • Vandelay installed and onboarded
  • At least one tool enabled (e.g., shell, file)

Step 1: Enable Team Mode

Team mode is on by default. Verify:

vandelay config  # → Team → check "enabled: true"

Step 2: Add Members

The easiest way is through the CLI:

vandelay config  # → Team → Add member → Start from template

This opens a template picker with 14 starter templates. Pick one (e.g., CTO, DevOps, Personal Assistant) and it's added to your team.

Manual Config

Or edit config.json directly:

{
  "team": {
    "enabled": true,
    "members": [
      "vandelay-expert",
      {
        "name": "my-researcher",
        "role": "Deep research specialist",
        "tools": ["tavily", "crawl4ai"],
        "instructions_file": "my-researcher.md"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Step 3: Assign Tools

Members can only use tools that are:

  1. Listed in the top-level enabled_tools
  2. Assigned to the member via their tools list

Enable tools first:

vandelay tools enable shell file python tavily

Step 4: Test Delegation

Start the agent and ask a question that requires a specific specialist:

You: Browse https://example.com and summarize the content
→ Supervisor delegates to browser specialist

You: List the files in my home directory
→ Supervisor delegates to system specialist

How Delegation Works

The supervisor reads AGENTS.md from the workspace to decide which member handles each request. Edit ~/.vandelay/workspace/AGENTS.md to customize delegation rules.

Next Steps