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teammate-cleanup-after-done

Teammate Cleanup — Shutdown After Done

Section titled “Teammate Cleanup — Shutdown After Done”

Rule

Section titled “Rule”

Teammates spawned via TeamCreate + Agent({team_name}) MUST be cleaned up after they finish. Trigger on TaskUpdate(status: "completed") flip — NOT on SendMessage receipt. Unlike Agent({run_in_background: true}) sub-agents (which self-terminate), teammates persist until explicitly shut down.

Full sequence (5-step shutdown, spawn-brief addendum, anti-patterns, history): docs/teammate-cleanup-after-done.md.

Verify at TWO levels — process AND tmux pane

Section titled “Verify at TWO levels — process AND tmux pane”

shutdown_request is often acknowledged but not honored, and force-killing a teammate’s process leaves its tmux pane open at an idle shell — so pgrep alone can report 0 agents while dead panes remain (process-dead ≠ pane-closed). Cleanup must kill the agent processes AND tmux kill-pane each leftover pane (keep the lead’s own pane; leave other projects’ tmux sessions), verifying with tmux list-panes — not pgrep alone — before TeamDelete.

Why

Section titled “Why”

Idle teammates hold mailbox connections + consume context budget; on long sessions with 8+ teammates this compounds. Established 2026-05-23 during DOTS-AI ChaosForge demo cook session.

Section titled “Related”
  • rules/agent-completion-discipline.md
  • skills/t1k-team/SKILL.md