Specialist roster

Use this page to understand who Guild Stack can assign to a run, why only a few specialists are selected at a time, and where you can approve or change the proposed team before work starts.

Try it: /guild:plan proposes a phase team, writes the team artifact, and waits at the team approval gate before dispatch.

Who ships

Since the v2.2 roster change (shipped on the beta next channel), Guild Stack registers 2 machinery agents with the host and ships 15 domain specialist type templates.

Group	Roles	What they are for
Engineering	architect, researcher, backend, frontend, mobile, devops, qa, security	Design, code, tests, infrastructure, release readiness, and risk review.
Content and communication	copywriter, doc-writer, technical-writer, social-media, seo	Public copy, product docs, doc-site pages, search, and communication work.
Commercial	marketing, sales	Positioning, campaigns, outbound, proposals, and discovery material.
Machinery (registered)	advisor, developer	Escalated judgment and generic implementation lanes.

The 15 domain specialists are the durable roster, shipped as read-only type templates at templates/specialists/<role>.md in every host package rather than as host-registered agents. The two machinery agents are the only agents Guild Stack registers with the host. They are augmenting: dispatchable, but excluded from domain matching and the team-size count. advisor answers narrow escalations at the powerful tier, and developer covers implementation work with no better domain owner.

Each specialist has a trigger boundary and a skill family, carried by its template and inherited verbatim by minted instances. Every role definition also carries persona frontmatter: an operating_style plus personality axes for terseness, pushback posture, and escalation bias. A backend lane should not quietly become deployment work; a copy lane should not become API reference; a security lane challenges risk instead of implementing the fix. Completed lanes return structured handoff receipts, so the next specialist can see what was done and what remains.

How a team is proposed

Guild does not put every role on every team. It composes a small team per phase by matching spec domains against your project’s specialist instances in .guild/agents/ plus the shipped template library. A domain specialist joins a team as a project instance: a template-covered domain with no instance yet is minted deterministically into .guild/agents/<role>.md — a byte-preserving copy of the template, stamped derived_from_template, with no approval gate because templates are pre-blessed. An existing instance is always reused, never re-created. Dispatch does not need a host-registered agent under the domain name; lanes run through a host-generic subagent type that adopts the minted definition.

The team artifact is:

.guild/team/<slug>.<phase>.yaml

The composer matches the phase, spec domains, and existing specialists. If it finds a genuinely novel domain the template library does not cover, it asks at the team gate whether to create, skip, substitute, or compose from scratch. Selecting create supplies explicit human authority: a genuinely new role does not need prior runs or reflections, but it still must pass its interview, boundary scan, applicable boundary evals, and new-role paired evals. Learning can also propose candidates; those evolution-proposed roles retain the historical extraction and shadow requirements and are never silently promoted into the live roster.

The usual team is 3-4 specialists. The default cap is 6; the machinery agents (advisor, developer) do not count toward it. Larger teams are possible, but Guild Stack prints the cap warning because bigger teams create more coordination and review work.

Beginner examples

If you ask for a new API endpoint, Guild Stack might propose:

Phase	Likely team	Why
Planning	architect, backend, qa	Decide the shape, implementation lane, and test evidence before code starts.
Development	backend, qa, maybe security	Build the endpoint, test it, and challenge auth or external-integration risk if present.
Quality	qa, devops, maybe security	Check release readiness instead of continuing feature implementation.

If you ask for website copy, Guild Stack might propose copywriter, seo, and doc-writer. If the request includes a public launch, marketing may join. If the work turns into implementation, frontend owns the UI lane instead of the copy specialist.

The important part: the team changes with the phase. The planning team can be right, and still not be the right quality team later.

Power-user controls

Power Users can inspect and steer the proposal before it becomes the run contract:

• Team file: .guild/team/<slug>.<phase>.yaml
• Plan lanes: .guild/plan/<slug>.md
• Approval gate: the G-team gate during planning
• Size control: /guild:plan --team-size=N
• Role gap options: create, skip, substitute, or compose from scratch
• Tier posture: each lane has a routing tier; the exact model id resolves through .guild/settings.json
• Capability scope: lanes may carry a tool allow-list; absent means no added lane-specific scope

Team composition is not the dispatch backend. The backend mode is resolved at run start, while the team file records who owns each lane for the current phase.

Roster reference

The first fifteen rows are the domain specialist templates; advisor and developer are the registered machinery agents.

Role	Typical trigger	Boundary
architect	System design, ADRs, tradeoffs	Does not implement the feature.
researcher	Research, comparison, papers, vendors	Does not make the architecture call.
backend	APIs, data, queues, workers, migrations	Does not own frontend, mobile, or infra release work.
frontend	Web UI, client state, accessibility, bundling	Does not own backend contracts or mobile clients.
mobile	iOS, Android, React Native, Expo	Does not own backend APIs.
devops	CI, deploy, observability, incidents, runbooks	Does not own application logic.
qa	Test strategy, regression, flaky tests, snapshots	Does not write the feature itself.
security	Threats, auth, secrets, CVEs, audits	Challenges and validates risk; fixes route to implementers.
copywriter	Product copy, microcopy, voice, email	Does not own API docs or technical reference.
doc-writer	Product docs, doc-site pages, README-style guides	Does not own API reference or marketing copy.
technical-writer	API docs, manuals, tutorials, release notes	Does not own marketing copy.
social-media	Posts, threads, calendars, engagement templates	Does not own long-form docs or campaigns.
seo	Keywords, metadata, internal links, crawl health	Does not own the core copy decision.
marketing	Positioning, launches, campaign briefs, A/B variants	Does not own sales outreach.
sales	Cold outreach, discovery, proposals, follow-up	Does not own launch strategy.
advisor	One narrow escalated question	Sees the draft and question, not raw context.
developer	Generic implementation lane	Defers to domain implementers when one fits.

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Related

• Architecture & Lifecycle, where the machinery agents and specialist templates sit in the lifecycle, and the skill taxonomy each role loads.
• Agent Communications, the handoff envelope and receipt contracts in detail.
• Cost-Aware Model Tiering, how each lane’s tier is auto-scored, plus advisor escalation.
• Self-Evolving Skills & Specialists, the minting lifecycle for project-specific specialists.