ClawTeam is HKUDS's MIT-licensed Python CLI where one leader agent spawns sub-agents, each into its own git worktree and tmux window, and coordinates them through CLI-command mailboxes and task boards the leader drives itself. **ClawTeam is the clearest agents-spawn-agents artifact of the 2026 swarm wave, and its record is also its caution: a five-day release train in March 2026, then silence.** ## What it is A `pip install`-able Typer CLI from the HKU Data Intelligence lab (HKUDS, the group behind LightRAG, RAG-Anything, and AI-Researcher), with the repository created 2026-03-17 and a Chinese-language roadmap describing the intended evolution. The design inverts who writes the orchestration: the human gives one prompt to a leader agent, and the leader runs `clawteam spawn` to create workers, `clawteam task` to assign and track work, and `clawteam inbox send` to report and coordinate, commands auto-injected into every worker's prompt. Each spawned worker gets its own git worktree, branch, tmux window, and identity, so parallel agents collide only through the task ledger rather than the filesystem. State lives in `~/.clawteam/` with pure file I/O and no database, a ZeroMQ P2P transport sits beside the file default, and `clawteam board serve` opens a web view of the running swarm. TOML templates ship prebuilt teams, and the tool drives any CLI agent, with Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, nanobot, and Cursor named in the README. ## Status Dormant with scale: 5,540 stars, 762 forks, 23 contributors, and 33 open issues and pull requests on a repository created 2026-03-17, last pushed 2026-05-09 (GitHub API, as of 2026-10-23). The release train lived five days: v0.1.2 on 2026-03-18 and v0.2.0 on 2026-03-23, with nothing since (GitHub releases), PyPI still serving the alpha-classified 0.2.0, and the README news log stopping in March 2026. The lab's agent attention demonstrably moved on: HKUDS's DeepCode holds 16.7k stars with a push on 2026-10-22 and RAG-Anything 24k (GitHub org search, as of 2026-10-23). Star History Chart I found no Hacker News story for the project (HN Algolia search, 2026-10-23), so the 5.5k stars arrived in the two months after launch through the lab's own channels and cross-promotion, the same uncorroborated-stars pattern this section flagged on Hive, Ruflo, and Yao. The absence of independent coverage is itself the signal I weight most here. ## Strengths - The spawn loop is real CLI surface, not a diagram: workers materialize as worktree, branch, and tmux pane with their identity and inbox prewired, and the leader coordinates through the same commands a human would type. - Zero infrastructure by design: file transport, one state directory, no Redis, queues, or database, which makes the two-agent case genuinely cheap to try. - TOML team templates turn a reusable multi-agent team into a config file, and the web board watches the swarm without a dashboard product. - The flagship demo is concrete and published: eight agents across eight H100s running 2,430-plus ML experiments, with the results repo (novix-science/autoresearch) separated from the marketing. ## Cautions - Dormant since 2026-05-09 with no release in seven months, so bugs and CLI-agent API drift accumulate unpatched. - The 5.5k stars have no independent discussion behind them; I could not find a single third-party write-up or thread. - The roadmap's v0.3 transport-abstraction and multi-user phases never shipped, and the roadmap document itself is still written in Chinese, a sign the project stopped before its own polish milestones. - One lab behind it, and that lab's attention is measurable elsewhere; treat the repository as a reference design, not a maintained dependency. ## Pricing Free and open source under MIT, with no hosted tier and no paid plan. You pay only for the model usage of the agents you spawn. ## Compared to - [Hive](../hive/index.md): the other colony pitch where a lead spawns its own workers; Hive holds the active release train and the bigger uncorroborated star count, ClawTeam the more legible CLI-first design. - [Ruflo](../ruflo/index.md): the meta-harness selling swarms, memory, and federation over Claude Code and Codex; Ruflo ships daily but measures its own adoption, while ClawTeam is smaller, quieter, and frozen. - [Gas Town](../gastown/index.md): the category's cautionary record of supervising many agents from tmux; Gas Town died loudly and left an extraction, ClawTeam went quiet without a successor. ## Bottom line Recommended for researchers studying the agents-spawn-agents pattern and for anyone who wants a readable reference for worktree-per-worker swarm coordination on the cheap. Not for production use, and not for anyone needing a maintained tool, because nothing has moved here since May 2026. ## Changes - 2026-10-23 - Created after the coordinator handoff flagged the unmatched repository at 5.5k stars, resolving the prior scan's dormant-since-May record in favor of admission on scale and provenance. ## See also - [Hive](../hive/index.md) - the active colony runtime in the same queen-spawns-workers family - [Ruflo](../ruflo/index.md) - the shipping meta-harness whose swarms pitch overlaps ClawTeam's - [Gas Town](../gastown/index.md) - the tmux swarm that died loudly, this note's cautionary sibling - [Orchestration Feature Matrix](../orchestration-feature-matrix/index.md) - the category comparison this column joins ## References - https://api.github.com/repos/HKUDS/ClawTeam - repository, license, counts, and dates (as of 2026-10-23) - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HKUDS/ClawTeam/main/README.md - the spawn, worktree, mailbox, and board model, agent support, and the news log that stops in March - https://api.github.com/repos/HKUDS/ClawTeam/releases - the v0.1.2 and v0.2.0 release train and dates - https://pypi.org/pypi/clawteam/json - the PyPI distribution, alpha classifier, and Python floors - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HKUDS/ClawTeam/main/ROADMAP.md - the unshipped v0.3 transport-abstraction and multi-user roadmap - https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=org:HKUDS+sort:pushed - the org listing grounding DeepCode's and RAG-Anything's live counts - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HKUDS/.github/main/profile/README.md - the HKUDS lab profile and its community channels - https://api.github.com/repos/novix-science/autoresearch - the published results repo behind the autoresearch demo - https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=ClawTeam&tags=story - the HN search returning no story for the project, the absence evidence (2026-10-23)