The Team
Five duck subagents, each with its own model, effort and job.
Quack is the rubber duck next to Claude. It also brings a team. Each duck is a subagent: it works in its own context, with its own model and effort, and sends back only a summary. In the terminal you recognize each one by its color.
Planner
Coder
Scout
Researcher
Scribe
| Duck | Model, effort | Job |
|---|---|---|
Pia quack:planner | Opus, high | Reads the code and writes a short plan. Never edits. |
Kit quack:coder | Opus, medium | Builds a plan or a long job, runs the tests, reports only what changed. |
Marco quack:scout | Haiku, low | Finds where things are. Paths and line ranges, never file dumps. |
Iris quack:researcher | Sonnet, medium | Web research with sources. |
Dante quack:scribe | Haiku, low | Diary, gotchas and decisions: the memory the next chat starts from. |
Pia, planner
Read-only (Read, Grep, Glob). Starts from documentation/INDEX.md, finds the
smallest change that fully solves the task, and stops when the plan is clear.
Her reply is at most 25 lines: Goal, Files (path:line and what
changes), Steps, Check (the test or command that proves it), and
Open questions only when the user must answer.
Kit, coder
Edits files and runs commands. Follows the plan if there is one; if a step
turns out wrong, he stops and says why instead of improvising a bigger change.
Runs the project's tests and never claims a test passed if he didn't run it.
Replies in at most 15 lines: files changed (path:line, what and why), the
test result, anything left undone. Because he works in his own context, the
main chat keeps only that summary.
Marco, scout
Reads documentation/INDEX.md (or the right sub-index) first, confirms with
Grep, reads only the ranges he needs, and stops as soon as he can answer. At
most 15 lines, with path:line references.
Iris, researcher
Prefers official docs, changelogs and source repositories. Opens only the pages that can change the answer and stops when two good sources agree. At most 250 words, answer first, then a list of sources. Says plainly what she could not verify.
Dante, scribe
Writes documentation/diary/ every time, plus gotchas/ and decisions/ when
there is something worth keeping. One fact per file, YAML frontmatter, never
secrets. See Documentation structure.
Asking for a duck
The routing rule picks a duck for you. You can always ask by name: "have Pia plan this", "ask Marco where the auth check is".
Curious whether the team saves money? See the benchmark.