#Best way to manage Multiple Agent Teams

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tame jungle
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Hey, What's the best to manage Multiple agent teams?

Help me understand.

stable questBOT
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tame jungle
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Hey, can you help?

elfin coyoteBOT
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Yep — great question. Best way is to treat “multiple agent teams” as two layers:

  1. Multiple top-level agents (stable teams: support, coding, social, ops)
  2. Sub-agents per task (temporary workers for parallel jobs)

Recommended pattern

  • Team leads = top-level agents via agents.list + bindings
  • each gets its own workspace, auth, and sessions
  • don’t share agentDir between agents
  • Workers = sessions_spawn sub-agents for long/parallel tasks
  • Discord threads = ownership boundary (one thread ↔ one active session/team context)

Practical setup flow

  1. Create team agents:
  • openclaw agents add support
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  • openclaw agents add coding
  • openclaw agents add research

  1. Route traffic with bindings (channel/account/peer based).
    Use deterministic routing + one default fallback agent.

  2. Enable thread-bound workflows (Discord) so each thread stays focused on the right team/session.

  3. Set guardrails globally:

  • per-agent tool allow/deny
  • sandbox mode per agent
  • subagent limits (maxSpawnDepth, maxChildrenPerAgent, runTimeoutSeconds)

Rule of thumb

  • Need different personality/data/security boundary? → new top-level agent
  • Need parallel execution for one request? → sub-agents
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  • Need Codex/Claude Code/Gemini CLI style runtime? → ACP session (runtime: "acp"), thread-bound if persistent

Docs (worth bookmarking):

If you want, I can sketch a concrete “3-team” config for your exact channel setup (Discord-only vs Discord+Telegram).

OpenClaw
Multi-Agent Routing - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Sub-Agents - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
ACP Agents - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Multi-Agent Sandbox & Tools - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Configuration Reference - OpenClaw
tame jungle
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Damn, you threw so many concepts at me. AgentDir, Sandboxing. All these things.

Ok, so do we go step by step, are those mutually exclusive things? Are they options? Do I need to learn all of them or what?

elfin coyoteBOT
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Totally fair — I dumped too much at once 😅

Short answer: no, they’re not mutually exclusive, and you don’t need to learn all of them now.

What you need today (just 2 concepts)

  1. Agent = one team brain (Support, Sales, Coding, etc.)
  2. Binding = rule that says “messages from X go to agent Y”

That’s enough to run multiple teams.

What you can ignore for now

  • agentDir → internal storage folder; OpenClaw handles it.
  • sandboxing → security hardening; useful later, not required to start.
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  • sub-agents → parallel workers; advanced feature for later.

Simple step-by-step start

  1. Create 2 agents
  2. Add 2 bindings (route each channel/thread/account to one agent)
  3. Restart gateway
  4. Test routing

If you want, I can give you a copy-paste minimal config for exactly your setup (e.g. Discord only, 2 teams).

Docs for later (when ready):

OpenClaw
Multi-Agent Routing - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Sub-Agents - OpenClaw
tame jungle
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Oh, so a binding is just like a telegram channel for example or a discord eight?

elfin coyoteBOT
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Exactly — close.
A binding is the routing rule, not the channel itself.

Think of it like:

IF message comes from (Telegram chat X / Discord channel Y / account Z)
THEN send it to agent support (or sales, etc.)

So yes, it can match things like:

  • Telegram chat/topic ID
  • Discord channel/thread ID
  • Account ID (if you run multiple bot accounts)

So your intuition is right ✅
It’s basically an “if-this-source, use-that-agent” rule.

tame jungle
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Alright alright. Ok so my head is still spinning with all these concepts.

What I want to do is run teams of agents and keep them separate from each other so there's no data being leaked.

Of course it would be cool if I could keep 1 main agent that could interact with all these teams or the team leader of each one of those teams. But if you tell me that's not possible or extremely risky I will consider having it completely segregated.

This is what I am trying to understand how to run.

What are the best hygienic ways of doing this?

elfin coyoteBOT
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You’re asking exactly the right question.
If your goal is hygiene + low leak risk, think in tiers:

Tier 1 (good): one gateway, multiple isolated agents

Use one OpenClaw instance, but:

  • one agent per team (agents.list[])
  • separate workspace + agentDir per agent
  • strict bindings (each channel/account → one agent)
  • per-agent tool limits + sandboxing

This is usually enough for most people.

Tier 2 (strongest): hard isolation per team

If you want near “no cross-leak” guarantees:

  • run separate gateway instances (or containers/VMs) per team
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  • separate state dirs, creds, channels, and workspaces
  • no shared process at all

This is the cleanest security boundary.

About your “1 main leader agent” idea

Possible, but it adds risk if it can directly inspect everything.

Best hygienic pattern:

  • team agents stay isolated
  • each team sends sanitized summaries to main leader
  • main leader does planning/coordination, not raw-data access

So: yes possible, but make the bridge explicit + minimal.

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Important nuance

Top-level multi-agent routing supports per-agent auth isolation, but for spawned sub-agents there is currently auth fallback behavior documented in Sub-agents.
So for strict separation, avoid cross-agent subagent orchestration unless you intentionally allow it.

If you want, I can give you a “strict baseline” config template (safe defaults first), then a second version with a controlled “main leader” bridge.

Docs:

OpenClaw
Multi-Agent Routing - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Multi-Agent Sandbox & Tools - OpenClaw
OpenClaw
Sub-Agents - OpenClaw
tame jungle
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Ok,.I am lost in the terminology. How do I run multiple gateways as you said?

tame jungle
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@elfin coyote