Glossary

Agent — a Markdown file defining a specialized role for Claude Code. Shipped as part of a team. Lives in agents/ in a team repo; copied into .claude/agents/ at the install scope.

atl — the CLI (atl install, atl list, …). Resolves and installs teams from the catalog. Go binary.

Catalog / Index — the way teams are discovered. A generated index built from public GitHub repositories tagged with the atl-team topic. atl search queries it; atl install resolves a handle against it. There is no registry repository, no teams.json, and no submission PR — tag a repo atl-team (or run atl publish from it) and the index picks it up. The cached copy lives at ~/.atl/index.json. See atl search.

Children pattern — a convention for complex agents: top-level agent.md stays short (identity, scope, principles, Knowledge Base); detailed knowledge lives as topic-per-file under children/. Each child file carries a knowledge-base-summary frontmatter field that /drain uses to auto-rebuild the parent agent.md's Knowledge Base section. Mirrored in skills as learnings/ (auto-rebuilds the skill.md's Accumulated Learnings section).

Dependencies — additional teams a team requires, specified via the dependencies field in team.json (a map of team name → version constraint). Resolved and installed at the same time as the team itself.

Handle — the catalog identifier you install by, in the form <handle>/<team> (e.g. agentteamland/software-project-team). The handle is the publisher namespace; atl install <handle>/<team> looks it up in the index and installs from the matching repo.

Manifest — the per-team, per-scope install record at <layer>/.atl/installed/<handle>__<name>.json (<layer> is ~/.atl for global, <project>/.atl for project). Records schemaVersion, handle, name, version, scope, source (repo, subpath, ref), installedAt, and a files map of installed path → SHA-256. Used by atl remove, atl update, and atl doctor.

Project — a directory you run atl in. Project-scope installs populate its .claude/ with the team's assets; ATL's project-scope bookkeeping lives under <project>/.atl/.

Rule — a Markdown file that's always loaded by Claude Code (unlike skills, which must be invoked). Shipped as part of a team in rules/; copied into .claude/rules/ at the install scope.

Scaffolder — team-scoped skill named /create-new-project that bootstraps a new project on the team's stack. Must follow the Scaffolder spec.

Scope — the layer an asset is installed into. Two scopes exist: global (assets in ~/.claude, ATL state in ~/.atl) and project (assets in <project>/.claude, ATL state in <project>/.atl). A team's publisher declares a default scope (project, global, or both; default project) in team.json; the user overrides with --global / --project. When a capability exists at both layers, the project layer shadows global — nearest wins.

SemVer constraint — version range syntax used in dependencies and requires.atl. ^1.0.0 (caret), ~1.2.0 (tilde), 1.2.3 (exact), >=1.2.0 (open-ended).

Skill — a user-invocable slash command (e.g. /verify-system). Shipped as a directory with skill.md at its root. Global skills live in ~/.claude/skills/; team-scoped skills ship with a team and appear in .claude/skills/ after install.

Team — a Git repository with team.json at its root, bundling agents, skills, and rules for a specific kind of work.

team.json — the manifest file at the root of every team repo. Declares the team's name, version, description, author, license, what it bundles (agents/skills/rules), its dependencies, the minimum requires.atl version, and an optional default scope. See the team.json contract.

Workspace — agentteamland/workspace, the maintainer hub repo where the platform is developed. Not needed to use AgentTeamLand; only relevant if you're contributing to the platform itself.

Journal — chronological per-agent learning record under .atl/journal/{date}_{agent}.md. Written by /drain as it folds the learning queue into the knowledge base; read by Claude during agent startup per the knowledge-system rule.

knowledge-base-summary — required YAML frontmatter field on every children/{topic}.md (and learnings/{topic}.md) file. One- to three-line summary that /drain extracts to rebuild the parent agent.md's Knowledge Base (or skill.md's Accumulated Learnings) section. Source-of-truth — hand edits to the rebuilt section are overwritten on the next /drain run.

knowledge-system — the core rule that defines the two-layer knowledge model (journal/ + wiki/). Renamed from memory-system after the agent-memory layer was merged into journal.

learnings/ — per-skill subdirectory mirroring agents' children/. Each learnings/{topic}.md carries knowledge-base-summary frontmatter; the skill's ## Accumulated Learnings section is auto-rebuilt from those.

Learning marker — inline HTML comment dropped by Claude during a conversation when a learning moment occurs. Format: <!-- learning: free text -->. Enqueued into the durable queue (~/.atl/queue.db) by atl tick (exactly once, deduped by content hash), then processed by /drain and acked (deleted).

Wiki — topic-organized current-truth knowledge under .atl/wiki/{topic}.md. Replaced (not appended) when truth changes; the <!-- wiki:index --> marker block in CLAUDE.md keeps the live index visible to Claude on every session start.