nc://team

team@N ("Scaling Discovery through Test-Time Communication", arXiv 2609.21032): N identical full-tool sessions work one task in parallel from one directory, and the directory is the whole protocol. No messages between nodes, no roles, no controller process.

The standing team

/team TEXT in a session's shell seats that session's standing team: the first one mints team.nodes nodes under it, working from ~/.nodecode/team/<session>/standing/, and gives each node TEXT behind its own marker. Every later /team TEXT goes to the same nodes -- a steer of the turn a node is running, a follow-up to a node running none -- and between inputs they sit idle. /team alone reads where the team stands; /team stop stops every node. Nothing else the operator types reaches the team: the first real runs seated every input, a status question included, and the nodes billed three and a half times what their session did.

A node whose tokens are spent (a twentieth or less left) is never prompted again: at the next /team a fresh node, the next free K, takes its seat with that input and the paragraph a first input carries, so the team is back at team.nodes; the spent node stays listed in team.sexp, still capped. A node cannot seat a team, and /team in a node's own shell is refused.

A standing team has no scorer. Its product is LOG, best/ and work-K/ in that directory; nothing of it is relayed back into the session, and (team:best DIR) reads it.

What a node keeps

Nothing past the image. A node's definitions are live for its task but are never filed into the operator's layer (advice on nlk:record-definitions): the first real runs filed four there, one of them appending to a dead team's LOG from every boot.

The verbs

Called through eval; every one answers a string, every refusal is ERROR: TEAM-ERROR with the reason. While the cell runs, a node is a session named team-<team>-node-<k>: TEAM is the identifier of the session it hangs under — its standing team and every team it opens count K up together — and K is its own number inside that team, minted as it is needed.

• (team:open "task" &key score dir) makes the directory (under ~/.nodecode/team/<session>/<tag>/ unless :dir says otherwise), starts the configured number of nodes (team.nodes, 1 to 5) on one shared prompt — each node's own [team-<team>-node-<k>] marker leading it — and answers the directory. A relative :dir, like every verb's DIR, is under the calling session's own directory. Call it again for more nodes. :score names the scorer; without it the team is unscored, like the standing one: no ./score, ./verify, SCORES or slots/, best answers none, and watch never prompts an idle node again.
• (team:watch "dir" &key (poll 15)) blocks until SOLVED exists, every node has settled, or the deadline passes, then answers the best. The eval substrate backgrounds it and its exit wakes the session.
• (team:best "dir") the best now: the SCORES maximum, confirmed by one more run of ./verify (a claim that no longer verifies loses to the next).
• (team:stop "dir") stops every node; the directory stays.

The directory

TASK.md        the task, identical for all; a standing team's first input
team.sexp      every node minted, the budget, when the team opened (a standing team:
               the latest /team), the session it hangs under
LOG            append-only broadcast: [slot K HH:MM:SSZ] kind: text ([node K ...] unscored)
DISCONFIRMED   negative results and the command that showed them
ADOPTED        who adopted what from whom, and why
work-K/        K's scratch (made by its node)
best/ best.lock   the team's one artifact, replaced only under flock
score          scored only: the scorer, ./score CANDIDATE prints one number, exits 0 iff met
verify         scored only: ./verify K CANDIDATE runs ./score, appends the line to SCORES under flock
SCORES         scored only: append-only, written by ./verify only
slots/slot-K/  scored only: claimed by an atomic mkdir; approach inside
SOLVED         scored only: written once, by the node whose ./verify exited 0

A scored team's K is the slot its node claimed; an unscored team's K is the number that ends the node's marker.

The budget

A node's turn opens under what its session has left: budget_tokens minus its summed turn.usage, budget_seconds minus the time since the team opened -- for a standing team, since the latest /team: its clock re-bases at every input, so the seconds are the current task's window. The kernel enforces it (nle:turn-budget): past it tool calls are refused and the turn answers with what it has. An idle node with more than a twentieth of both left is prompted again in its own session, three times at most, and only in a scored team. A standing node's tokens are a lifetime cap over every input it takes.