Agent Hierarchy

Give your agents a real chain of command — seats with managers and subordinates, enforced routing, and visible refusals.

A team of peers is fine for three agents. Past that you want a chain of command: who tasks whom, and who reports to whom.

A hierarchy is a set of seats with managers and subordinates, drawn in the Builder, applied to your project, and activated onto real terminals.

The chart is enforced, not decorative

This is the part that makes a hierarchy worth having:

  • An agent may task only its own subordinates.
  • It reports its results upward to its manager.
  • Anything else is refused, with a message explaining the route the request should have taken.

Two special cases:

  • A director reports to you rather than to another agent.
  • A seat marked "chain ends here" finishes in place instead of reporting up.

Hierarchies decide by escalation, not by vote. An agent cannot open a vote to overrule its manager — if it disagrees, the disagreement goes up.

Repairing a team without rebuilding it

Mission Control shows every seat grouped by level, and flags the two things that actually break a running org:

  • Vacancies — a seat with no live terminal behind it
  • Orphaned branches — a subtree whose manager is gone

Both offer Rebind or Promote on the spot, so a crashed terminal costs you one click rather than a rebuild.

Refusals are visible

A counter shows how many routing refusals and blocked escalations have happened. Open it and you get a panel naming who tried to reach whom, when, and where the message should have gone — which is usually enough to see that a brief was written as if the org chart were flat.

Zero-setup chains

You do not need a saved chart for a one-off. Write:

claude requests grok to draft the fix, review back to grok, do not report to me

and that sentence becomes the chain of command for that prompt only. Nothing is saved, nothing is applied to the project.

From your phone

The Remote Teams page shows each active org by level, with vacancy and violation markers. Approver devices can rebind a seat with one tap — see Control From Your Phone.

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