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Quickstart

This page is a one-screen walkthrough that creates a CAFleet fleet, spawns two member panes, and sends a message between them. It assumes you have already followed Install and Configure.

Simple example — invoke from a coding agent

For the simplest path, ask Claude Code or Codex to demonstrate CAFleet for you. Inside an agent, send the following prompt:

I want to see how cafleet works.
Please create a new team with two members using cafleet and let them ping-pong each other.
After the demonstration, please shutdown the team.

The coding agent will invoke the cafleet skill, which guides it through the fleet-create / member-create / message-send loop and finally tears the team down.

Design-doc-driven development

CAFleet ships built-in skills for spec-driven development (SDD). The CAFleet project itself uses them to evolve — every change lands as a design document first, executed by a CAFleet-orchestrated Director / Drafter / Reviewer team.

Invoke the cafleet-design-doc-create skill with a one-line request, e.g.:

I want to create a simple TUI calculator.

See your coding-agent's skill documentation for the literal invocation syntax (Claude Code's /skills, codex's /skills, opencode's skill discovery).

Raw CLI walkthrough

If you would rather drive CAFleet from the shell directly, the commands below mirror what the skill does internally. Run them inside a tmux session — the fleet create and member create commands require one.

The walkthrough pastes literal integer ids: fleet 1, root Director 2, members 4 and 5, task 10. Your ids will differ — substitute the integers your own commands print.

Create a fleet. This records your current pane as the root Director's pane:

cafleet fleet create --label "demo"

1 director=2 admin=3

The line carries the fleet id (1), the root Director's agent id (2), and the built-in Administrator's agent id (3). If it scrolls away, run cafleet fleet list — it re-prints the fleet id and the Director id (the DIRECTOR column).

Spawn two member panes. Each member's prompt is just a one-line greeting. Optional: add --model <m> (e.g. --model sonnet) to pin a member's LLM; omitted, the backend binary uses its own default model:

cafleet --fleet-id 1 member create \
  --agent-id 2 \
  --name "demo-member" \
  --description "Demo member" \
  -- "You are demo-member. Reply hello when polled."

4 demo-member backend=claude pane=%7

cafleet --fleet-id 1 member create \
  --agent-id 2 \
  --name "reviewer" \
  --description "Reviewer member" \
  -- "You are reviewer. Reply hello when polled."

5 reviewer backend=claude pane=%8

List the fleet's agents — the new members' ids (4 and 5) appear alongside the Director and the Administrator:

cafleet --fleet-id 1 agent list

2 Director active

3 Administrator active

4 demo-member active

5 reviewer active

Send a message between the members — demo-member (4) messages reviewer (5):

cafleet --fleet-id 1 message send --agent-id 4 --to 5 --text "hi"

Message sent.
[10 | from:4 | 2026-06-11T09:00:00.123456+00:00]
hi

reviewer receives the message as a 2-line inline preview pushed into its tmux pane and the message lands in the broker queue. From here, the typical flow is cafleet message poll from the recipient and cafleet message ack once it has consumed the message.

When you are done, tear the fleet down:

cafleet --fleet-id 1 member delete --member-id 4
cafleet --fleet-id 1 member delete --member-id 5
cafleet fleet delete 1

Deleted fleet 1. Deregistered 2 agents.

Where to go next: