Option 3 — Specialist Swarm

Concept landed: Skills, plugins & sub-agents Tech: Claude Managed Agents multi-agent + custom Skills + the pre-built docx skill Time: 60 minutes Output: A coordinator agent that fans work out to 3-5 specialist sub-agents, each with its own skills, that assemble a real branded Word document.

The pitch

This is the architecture that wins the next $50M transformation deal: coordinator + specialists + skills. It maps directly to how every services firm structures real work. A senior partner orchestrates; specialists (legal, pricing, technical) own their lanes; the senior partner synthesises and delivers.

You’re going to build exactly that, in 60 minutes, around a Deal Desk scenario. Drop an RFP in, get a branded response doc out, watch the parallelism happen in real time on the events stream.

Setup (5 min)

You need a workspace API key on the Console (multi-agent is currently in research preview — your workspace may need to be granted access).

cd 03-specialist-swarm
pip install -r requirements.txt
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."

Pick a scenario card

Three cards in scenario-cards.md. Each gives you a coordinator + a different roster of specialists. Pick one. Different teams should pick different cards.

Core build (25 min)

1. Create the specialists. Run python create_specialists.py. This creates 3-4 sub-agents (Pricing, Legal, Technical Fit, Competitive) and saves their IDs to .specialist_ids.json.

2. Create the coordinator. Run python create_coordinator.py. This creates the coordinator agent with multiagent: coordinator config, listing the specialists in its callable roster.

3. Upload the skills. Run python upload_skills.py. This packages the custom skills in skills/ and uploads them via the Skills API. Each specialist gets the skill that matches its domain.

4. Run the deal. Run python run_deal_desk.py. This:

   • Uploads the synthetic RFP (synthetic-data/rfp-acme-corp.md) as a file
   • Starts a session against the coordinator
   • Asks the coordinator to produce a full proposal response
   • Streams the events so you can watch the parallel thread fan-out
   • Saves the final docx to outputs/proposal-response.docx

By minute 30 you have a Word document in outputs/, generated by a coordinator + specialists who each used their own skill.

Stretch goals (20 min)

See stretch-goals.md. The big ones:

• Custom firm-voice skill — codify your own firm’s voice (every services firm has one)
• Critic sub-agent — add a fifth agent that reviews the coordinator’s draft before it’s finalised