273 free AI specialists, one text file each — and why you should install six

# The Agency: 273 free AI specialists, and the six worth installing

A folder of markdown files has 150,093 stars on GitHub. No binary, no service, no key. It is
called The Agency — msitarzewski/agency-agents — and it is MIT licensed.

Inside are 273 agent files spread across 18 divisions. Each file is a written specialist: a role,
a personality, a working process, and the deliverables it is expected to hand back. Open
engineering/engineering-frontend-developer.md and the first thing you see is frontmatter:

name: Frontend Developer
color: cyan
vibe: Builds responsive, accessible web apps with pixel-perfect precision.

Then a mission, a set of workflows, and success metrics. It is not a pasted system prompt with a
job title on top.

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/msitarzewski/agency-agents.git
cd agency-agents
./scripts/install.sh --list teams

Or skip the terminal entirely: there is a desktop app for macOS, Linux and Windows that browses
the roster and installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Windsurf, OpenCode
and Qwen with a click. On a Mac:

brew install --cask msitarzewski/agency-agents/agency-agents

## The part almost nobody says out loud

273 agents is not 273 hires. It is a directory. A roster you have not learned is indistinguishable
from noise, and the cost is paid every time you have to remember which of 273 names is the right
one for the job in front of you.

The installer already assumes you know this. It ships two flags that most write-ups skip:

./scripts/install.sh --division design --dry-run

--division takes one team instead of the whole building. --dry-run prints the plan and exits
without writing anything, so the first thing you run cannot touch your config:

The Agency -- Dry run (nothing written)
  Tools:   claude-code
  Teams:   design
  Agents:  10   Mode: copy

Ten files, named, before a single one lands.

And there is a hard limit worth knowing before you bulk-install. The installer itself warns about
it: OpenCode's runtime currently registers roughly 119 agents and silently drops the rest
(anomalyco/opencode#27988). Push all 273 into it and about 154 never load, with no error. The
installer prints the warning; nothing else will.

./scripts/install.sh --tool claude-code --agent \
  engineering-frontend-developer,engineering-backend-architect,engineering-code-reviewer,testing-api-tester,design-ui-designer,product-sprint-prioritizer

• Frontend Developer — UI work, framework choices, performance.
• Backend Architect — APIs, schema, anything with a database behind it.
• Code Reviewer — run it on your own diff before anyone else sees it.
• API Tester — turns "it works on my machine" into a checked claim.
• UI Designer — the second opinion you do not otherwise have.
• Sprint Prioritizer — decides what not to build this week.

Six is not a magic number. It is small enough that you will remember all of them by Friday, which
is the only property that matters. Add a seventh the first time you actually miss one.

It is not a model and it is not a runtime. The companion app's own README says so plainly: it
installs personas into other tools, it does not execute them. Nothing here reduces your API bill
or replaces the CLI you already pay for. It changes how that CLI behaves, which is a smaller claim
and a true one.

And it will not route work for you. A free team still needs somebody deciding who does what, and
that is you.

---

The free kit — roster.py reads your clone and prints every division with its real agent
count, or the six above plus the exact install command. Python 3, standard library only, no
network, writes nothing. Comment ROSTER and it comes to your DMs.

*Numbers verified 2026-09-05 against the live GitHub API and a read-only clone: 150,093 stars,
24,178 forks, MIT, 18 divisions in divisions.json, 273 files carrying agent frontmatter.*