Agentic Teams

Overview

Traditional agent systems run in isolation - one agent, one task, one conversation. Agentic Teams breaks this paradigm by enabling structured collaboration between multiple specialist agents, each with defined roles and boundaries.

A team has an orchestrator that receives high-level objectives and decomposes them into discrete tasks. Each task is routed to the best-suited member agent based on domain expertise. Tasks execute in parallel where possible, with budget guardrails preventing runaway costs.

Core Concepts

Six primitives form the foundation of the Agentic Teams system:

Team Manifest

Every team is defined by a JSON manifest that declares its structure, members, and policies. Manifests can be exported, shared, and installed across QuoxCORE instances.

{
  "id": "secops",
  "type": "team",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "displayName": "SecOps Team",
  "orchestrator": { "agentId": "sentinel", "domains": ["security"] },
  "members": [
    { "agentId": "nova", "role": "specialist", "domains": ["network"] },
    { "agentId": "cipher", "role": "specialist", "domains": ["cryptography"] }
  ],
  "policies": {
    "maxBudgetTokens": 200000,
    "maxBudgetToolCalls": 100,
    "maxParallelTasks": 3,
    "requireApprovalBeforeStart": true
  }
}

Objectives & Tasks

An objective is a high-level goal submitted to a team. The orchestrator decomposes it into tasks, which are then distributed to member agents. The lifecycle follows a strict state machine:

Tasks can finish with a status of completed, failed, or skipped. The orchestrator aggregates results and determines the final objective status.

Autonomous Scheduling

Teams can be configured with cron-based schedules that automatically create objectives at defined intervals. This enables unattended operations like nightly security sweeps, hourly health checks, or weekly compliance audits.

Schedule Presets

Budget Guardrails

Every team operates within strict budget boundaries. Policies are enforced at the team level and checked before each task execution and scheduled trigger. Exceeding any limit pauses execution and raises an alert.

Team Packs

A Team Pack is a bundle of related teams that can be installed together in a single operation. Packs define which teams are included, their default configurations, and any shared policies. This makes it easy to deploy pre-configured multi-team setups.

{
  "id": "quoxcore-demo-pack",
  "type": "pack",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "displayName": "QuoxCORE Demo Pack",
  "description": "Starter pack with QuoxCORE and SecOps teams",
  "teams": [
    { "manifestUrl": "./teams/quoxcore.json" },
    { "manifestUrl": "./teams/secops.json" }
  ],
  "sharedPolicies": {
    "maxDailyTokens": 1000000,
    "alertAtBudgetPercent": 75
  }
}

Team rooms (shipped 2026-07)

Every agentic team gets its own governed Matrix room, created when the team is installed or created and removed when the team is deleted. The room holds the team's orchestrator, its member agents, and your org's people, so a human can watch a team work or step in without leaving Rooms for a separate chat tool.

Replies in a team room are governed and witnessed the same way as any other Quox comms surface: every turn goes through the collector and is recorded in the WARD witness chain, not a side channel the team can bypass.

API Reference

All team operations are available through the QuoxCORE REST API:

Example: Create an Objective

POST /api/objectives
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "teamId": "secops",
  "title": "Nightly security sweep",
  "description": "Scan all fleet hosts for open ports, expired certs, and CVEs",
  "priority": "normal",
  "tags": ["security", "compliance"]
}