/gaia-party

What it does

/gaia-party runs a multi-participant group discussion where GAIA agents and stakeholder personas take turns discussing a topic. GAIA acts as moderator, selecting relevant participants from the installed agents and custom stakeholders. Each participant contributes their unique perspective in sequential rounds.

When to use it

• You want diverse perspectives on a design decision, feature proposal, or technical approach.
• You want to simulate a stakeholder discussion before a real meeting.

Prerequisites

• No strict prerequisites. Works best when planning artifacts exist for context.

Orchestration mode

When /gaia-party starts in subagent mode (Mode A -- the default), the framework emits a one-shot warning to your conversation. The warning text:

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
GAIA orchestration: running in subagent mode (Mode A)

The skill you're invoking belongs to a class (heavy-procedural or
conversational) whose output benefits from cross-step context. Mode A
dispatches each sub-agent in its own forked context, so context may
be lossy between steps — sub-agents return summaries, not full reasoning.

For the full-fidelity experience, enable Mode B (Agent Teams):
  1. Set CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1 in your environment.
  2. Add orchestration.mode: team to .gaia/config/project-config.yaml.

Mode B uses persistent teammates that preserve in-conversation state
across dispatches.

This warning is shown once per session.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Why Mode B is better for this command

The /gaia-party skill declares orchestration_class: conversational in its SKILL.md frontmatter. Conversational skills produce output that benefits from cross-step context -- under Mode A every sub-agent dispatch runs in its own forked context and can only return a summary back to the orchestrator, losing the full reasoning trace of every prior step. Mode B uses persistent teammates that retain in-conversation state across dispatches, so each agent's contribution can build on what was said before instead of receiving only a summary.

How to enable Mode B

Both steps are required. If either is missing, the framework falls back silently to Mode A and the warning fires again on the next session.

Step 1 -- set the environment variable:

export CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1

Add this to your shell rc file to persist across sessions, or set it in Claude Code's settings.json.

Step 2 -- add the YAML block to .gaia/config/project-config.yaml:

orchestration:
  mode: team

One-shot semantics

The warning is emitted once per Claude Code session. A marker file at _memory/checkpoints/orchestration-warning-shown.<session-id> suppresses the warning for the rest of the session. Starting a new session re-emits the warning once.

How to invoke

/gaia-party Should we use microservices or a monolith?

What it does step by step

1. Load participants Discovers available GAIA agents and custom stakeholders from custom/stakeholders/.
2. Invite participants Selects the most relevant participants for the topic and presents the invite list.
3. Run discussion rounds Each participant takes a turn sharing their perspective. Rounds continue until the discussion converges or you end the session.
4. Generate artifact Writes the discussion transcript and key takeaways to .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/party-mode-{date}.md.

Inputs

Outputs

Example session

> /gaia-party Should we use microservices or a monolith?

Inviting participants:
  Theo (Architect)
  Derek (Product Manager)
  Sable (Test Architect)

Round 1:
  Theo: From an architecture standpoint...
  Derek: The product timeline suggests...
  Sable: Testing complexity favors...

Key takeaways written to .gaia/artifacts/creative-artifacts/party-mode-2026-05-07.md

What to run next

• Review the discussion transcript and extract decisions or action items.
• /gaia-action-items -- extract and track action items from the discussion.

Troubleshooting

Topic not provided

The command asks for your topic interactively if no argument is given.

I keep seeing the GAIA orchestration warning every time I start this command

The warning is shown once per session, so if it fires again that's a new session -- not a per-skill repeat. If you want to silence it entirely, enable Mode B (full-fidelity orchestration via Agent Teams). Both of these conditions must be true:

• echo $CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS returns 1 (not empty)
• .gaia/config/project-config.yaml contains:

  orchestration:
    mode: team

If either is missing the framework silently uses Mode A and re-emits the warning each session.

Related commands