Crews and roles

Published October 28, 2026 · by the AQ team

A crew in AQ is a named team of agents for a kind of work: a Lead that plans and delegates, and roles that do the steps. You pick a crew in the composer like a model, or say "run this as the Ship crew" in any work item, and the thread becomes the crew's Lead.

Roles

A role is a job with a contract: what it does, what it may touch, and what it must report. The built-in roles are Lead, Build, Review, Test and Research. Organizations can add their own roles in Settings, Crews. Each role runs on the pick your organization set for it (a subscription, an AQ model, or Auto); a crew can override those picks.

Built-in crews

• Ship: plan, build in slices, independent review, test, pull request.
• Review: a read-only review of the branch, bound to the head commit.
• Fix: reproduce, fix, independent review, test.

Copy one to edit its playbook, or write a new crew from scratch.

The plan gate

With the plan gate on, the Lead proposes its steps and the thread waits for you: Approve, Edit the plan, or Run in one thread instead. Until you approve, no role that can edit code starts.

Delegation

The Lead delegates each step to a role, either in its own worktree (a child work item nested under the Lead's) or in the shared worktree. Each member is an ordinary thread: open its row in the Lead's activity to watch it live, steer it or stop it. A member ends with a report of what it claimed, the files it touched, the commands it ran and the tests. The Lead then merges the builders' branches into its own; a conflict comes back with the files so the right builder can fix it.

Independent review

When Auto chooses the reviewer, it prefers another vendor and account than the builder's. The crew summary reports per-role time and cost and what the review found. Reviews focused on security can run on Hinoki. Ending the Lead's work item ends every live member. Product overview: Crews.