ryanmaclean Tiger Team — Multi-Perspective Attack on a Single Hard Problem
Overview
A tiger team is a classic ops concept: a small group of elite specialists brought in to crack ONE hard problem fast, from multiple attack angles simultaneously. Think security red teams, incident response, or NASA's tiger teams that fixed Apollo 13.
Each specialist gets the same problem statement but a different persona injected into their prompt. They run in parallel Zellij panes. You (the leader) read all outputs and synthesize the best path forward.
When to use what
| Tool | Use when... |
|---|---|
| tiger-team | One hard problem, need multiple expert lenses (debug, arch decision, security review) |
| zellij-team | Multiple independent tasks that can run in parallel |
| a-team | Sequential pipeline where each step feeds the next |
Specialist Roles
| Role | Persona | Lens |
|---|---|---|
attacker |
Red-team adversary | Finds where the approach breaks, stress-tests assumptions, identifies failure modes |
defender |
Safety-first engineer | Finds what's solid, builds the safest path forward, identifies invariants to preserve |
architect |
Systems thinker | Looks at structural/systemic angle, considers interfaces, coupling, and long-term implications |
pragmatist |
Ship-it engineer | What's the fastest working solution right now, minimal viable fix, unblocks immediately |
Quick Start
# All 4 specialists on a hard problem
nu ~/.claude/skills/tiger-team/tiger-team.nu \
--problem "Why won't i9 federate with Pi workers in BEAM cluster"
# Just 2 specialists for a quick take
nu ~/.claude/skills/tiger-team/tiger-team.nu \
--problem "Auth middleware stores session tokens in plaintext" \
--roles [attacker pragmatist]
# Dry run to see what would be spawned
nu ~/.claude/skills/tiger-team/tiger-team.nu --dry-run \
--problem "Debug why BEAM cluster won't federate"
How Results Are Synthesized
After all specialists finish (or you've read enough):
- Read each pane's output — look for convergence and divergence
- Where specialists agree: high-confidence path
- Where they disagree: the interesting tension that needs your judgment
- The pragmatist's answer is your "do this now"; the architect's is your "do this right"
- The attacker found the risks; the defender found the guardrails
Layout
Specialists open in a new Zellij tab named tiger-<timestamp>:
- 2 specialists: side by side
- 3-4 specialists: 2x2 grid
Agent Flags
Same as zellij-team: workers run with --dangerously-skip-permissions --permission-mode bypassPermissions.
You are watching and can ctrl-c any pane.