Loom Team Lifecycle Management

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Purpose

Manage complete Loom team worker lifecycle: spawn, assign tickets, track progress, handle merges, retire workers.

When To Use

• You are a team manager for a Loom team (e.g., MiyagiDo)
• Need to manage multiple workers in parallel
• Workers are implementing tickets in isolated worktrees
• Team commands are available

Preconditions

• Loom team initialized: loom team init <TEAM>
• Ticket system initialized: loom ticket init
• Workers available to spawn

Procedure

1. Spawn Workers for Tickets

• loom team spawn <TEAM> <TICKET_ID>
• Workers handle their own worktree creation
• Monitor team status: loom team status <TEAM>

2. Track Worker Progress

• Regularly check: loom team inbox <TEAM> list --to manager --unacked
• Capture worker output when needed: loom team capture <TEAM> <WORKER_ID>
• Acknowledge messages: loom team inbox <TEAM> ack <MESSAGE_ID>

3. Handle Ready for Review

• When worker sends READY_FOR_REVIEW:
  • Add manager review note: `loom ticket add-note <id> 'Manager review: ...'
  • Enqueue to merge queue: loom team merge <TEAM> enqueue --ticket <id> --branch <branch> --from-worker <worker>
  • Close ticket: loom ticket close <id> (if approval is straightforward)

4. Monitor Merge Queue

• Check merge status: loom team merge <TEAM> list
• When merge completes, acknowledge message from merge worker

5. Ship Changes

• When all tickets merged to merge-queue: loom team ship <TEAM>
• This merges merge-queue to main branch

6. Retire Workers

• loom team retire <TEAM> <WORKER_ID>
• If retirement fails with workspace cleanup error:
  • Check worker worktree status: git status in worktree
  • May need to handle cleanup manually

7. Worker Communication

• Send encouragement and next-step guidance via loom team send <TEAM> <WORKER_ID> 'message'
• Workers should be informed of successful merges and retirement

Best Practices

• Spawn workers in priority order (P1 before P2)
• Verify ticket completion before enqueue (check code files exist)
• Keep merge queue clear after shipping
• Document blockers in ticket notes

Gotchas

• Workers may mark tickets complete before actual code exists
• Workspace cleanup can fail with modified/​untracked files
• Merge conflicts require resolution in merge worker worktree
• Ship may be NOOP if changes already in main

Examples

Complete Phase 3 P1 tickets:

# 1. Spawn workers
loom team spawn MiyagiDo vp-cf95  # Orchestration engine
loom team spawn MiyagiDo vp-6cf1  # CLI
loom team spawn MiyagiDo vp-7d49  # Scheduling

# 2. Wait for completion
loom team inbox MiyagiDo list --to manager --unacked

# 3. Approve and enqueue
loom team merge MiyagiDo enqueue --ticket vp-cf95 --branch team/​vp-cf95 --from-worker w2
loom team merge MiyagiDo enqueue --ticket vp-6cf1 --branch team/​vp-6cf1 --from-worker w1

# 4. Ship
loom team ship MiyagiDo

# 5. Retire
loom team retire MiyagiDo w2
loom team retire MiyagiDo w1

Handle workspace cleanup failure:

# Error: contains modified or untracked files
# Solution:
loom team send MiyagiDo w2 'Please clean up your worktree before retirement'
# Or manually check and cleanup
git status .team/​runs/​MiyagiDo/​worktrees/​vp-cf95

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Manual notes

This section is preserved when the skill is updated. Put human notes, caveats, and exceptions here.