Claude Crew Plugin

Overview

crew is a Claude Code plugin that runs tiered agents: an Opus advisor on call, a Sonnet lead for medium tasks, and Haiku workers that do most of the work. A live pane draws the crew as an animated diagram, the status line shows each tier's state, and every event is written to a session log.

The problem

The plugin keeps most of the work on cheap Haiku workers and calls in Opus only for plans, reviews and repeated errors. I had the idea and it was fun to build.

What I did

• Built the three tiers: an ask_advisor tool (plan, review, stuck or question) that answers OK, ADVICE or QUESTIONS, plus crew:scout and crew:worker Haiku agents for lookups and well-specified edits.
• Capped subagents at three running at once by default (configurable up to ten). Extra spawns are refused with a wait message, and the lead is told the cap up front.
• Built the /crew pane in TSX: an advisor column, a lead box, a route share, fan-out to worker cards and a hand-back bus, plus a click-to-watch row that opens any worker's live transcript.
• Wrote hooks that log every event to a per-session file, and a status line that shows each tier's state.
• Added the /advise and /crew-audit commands. /crew-audit gives a read-only CLAUDE.md audit against Claude Code best practices.
• Exposed user settings for the advisor and worker models, the subagent cap, the advisor-before-done behaviour and whether the pane opens at start.
• Wrote a test suite on the plugin's test harness (tests/crew.test.tsx).

Stack

• TypeScript (strict) and TSX
• Claude Code plugin system: hooks, plugin modules, the status line and the claude-code plugin API with its testing helpers
• Opus, Sonnet and Haiku models

Outcome / impact

• Marked as v1.0.0 in its manifest and first commit, dated 2 Nov 2026.
• Documented in its README with the tier table, a guide to the pane and the command list.
• It is for personal use. By my own rough estimate it cuts usage by about 25 to 40 percent, depending on the task.

Gallery