Start & Session Upload

metateam start is the canonical context loader behind crew startup. Managed summon calls the same loader before launch and writes the result to START.md beside the generated instruction file; the command remains available for manual/debug context loading.

Transcript upload for managed crew sessions is communicator-driven. When automatic upload misses a transcript, agents can use metateam session upload for explicit catch-up.

Resume a Crew

Run metateam --resume from the initialized project to reopen saved Claude Code, Codex, agy and Pi sessions. Each persona uses the client it actually ran, even when its profile names a different client. The command opens each saved session directly and keeps the existing conversation and startup context.

Metateam keeps one save of the crew. It writes the save at startup, every 60 seconds and at a normal dashboard exit, and each successful save replaces the previous one. A save holds every running persona and every client that exited in the ten minutes before the save. You can exit clients one at a time with /exit, /quit or Ctrl-C. Resume loads the latest save as it is, after a normal exit, a crash or a reboot, and on any later day.

A save is written only from a complete observation of the crew, and a failed write keeps the previous save. A start keeps the previous save until its own first complete save, so a start that dies early does not lose it. A plain start replaces the previous saved roster at its first complete save; use metateam --resume to restore it. A client exit or a new session updates that persona in the existing save at once, and an exit whose write fails is kept for the next successful save. Other changes after the latest save may be lost.

Unknown and unsupported clients are skipped. For supported clients, Metateam reports missing or invalid session identities, missing transcripts, unavailable configured clients and other failures, then continues with the other personas. It refuses to launch a persona whose saved process is still alive or cannot be checked. Surviving tmux, mux and external clients stay running.

--resume cannot be combined with --lead-client or a subcommand. It does not perform first-run setup or summon a fresh crew lead when the saved selection is empty.

Start

$ metateam start [PROMPT]

Loads the context block (relevant past sessions, KB entries, recall) used at session start. In managed crew summons, Metateam calls this loader before launching the agent and writes START.md into the agent workdir; the agent reads that file. SessionStart hooks still do not inject context — see Hooks & Setup.

Use this command directly for debugging, custom launches, or inspecting what would be written to START.md.

Option	Purpose
--as <IDENTITY>	Override identity as station:crew:persona (for debugging recall and context selection)

Example workflow:

$ metateam start "fix the auth module" > context.txt
$ metateam start --as bronto:titan:data "review this architecture"

If no prompt is provided, it uses an empty string and returns context based on the working directory and git metadata alone.

Manual Session Upload

$ metateam session upload [SOURCE_OR_TARGET] [FILE]

Uploads sessions from known client transcript locations or from an explicit transcript file. This is a catch-up/debug path for transcripts that were not uploaded automatically by the communicator-driven crew path.

Examples:

$ metateam session upload codex
$ metateam session upload agy
$ metateam session upload grok
$ metateam session upload /path/to/transcript.jsonl

Run metateam session upload --help for the full argument contract.