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Run Meetings

This guide covers running meetings with your team members and defining custom meetings in a profile.

Prerequisites

  • A team initialized with a profile that defines meetings (e.g., agentic-sdlc-planning)
  • At least one member hired for the role referenced by the meeting
  • Members hired (bm hire <role>)

Running a meeting

List available meetings with --help:

bm meetings --help

Start a meeting by name:

bm meetings planning

This resolves the meeting's member field to a hired member of that role, writes the meeting's instructions as the system prompt, and launches the coding agent with the meeting's prompt as the initial message.

Passing context

Append free-form text after the meeting name to pass additional context:

bm meetings planning plan the auth feature for project-x

If the meeting defines a prompt (e.g., start), your input is appended to it. If there is no prompt, your input becomes the initial message.

Meeting has prompt You pass args Agent receives
start plan the auth feature start plan the auth feature
start (none) start
(none) plan the auth feature plan the auth feature
(none) (none) (no initial message — you type first)

Flags must come before free-form text

Place -t and -a before the free-form input. Flags after the first word of input are captured as part of the text sent to the agent, not parsed as CLI flags.

# Correct — flag before input
bm meetings planning -t my-team plan the auth feature

# Wrong — flag is sent to the agent as text
bm meetings planning plan the auth feature -t my-team

Targeting a specific team

bm meetings planning -t my-team

Running with skip-permissions

Use -a to pass --dangerously-skip-permissions to the coding agent:

bm meetings planning -a

Defining meetings in a profile

Meetings are defined in the meetings list in a profile's botminter.yml. Each meeting becomes a subcommand of bm meetings.

Minimal meeting

meetings:
  - name: standup
    description: "Daily standup check-in"
    member: engineer
    instructions: |
      You are an engineer on this team.
      The operator wants a quick standup update.
      Review the GitHub Project board and summarize:
      - What was completed since the last standup
      - What is in progress
      - Any blockers

This creates bm meetings standup. No prompt field — the operator types the first message.

Meeting with initial prompt

meetings:
  - name: verification
    description: "Verify acceptance criteria for completed work"
    member: engineer
    instructions: |
      You are an engineer on this team.
      You are in a verification meeting with the human (PO).
      You MUST load the `verification` skill to verify acceptance criteria.
      Ask the user for the work item (issue number) to verify.
    prompt: start

Adding prompt: start means the agent receives start as the first message and begins immediately — no waiting for the operator to type.

Meeting with skill loading

Meetings don't inherit skills from the member's hat configuration. If the meeting needs a skill, tell the agent to load it in the instructions:

meetings:
  - name: retro
    description: "Sprint retrospective"
    member: chief-of-staff
    instructions: |
      You are the chief of staff on this team.
      You are running a sprint retrospective.
      You MUST load the `retrospective` skill.
      Guide the operator through:
      1. What went well
      2. What didn't go well
      3. Action items for next sprint
    prompt: start

Multiline instructions

Use YAML literal block scalars (|) for multiline instructions:

instructions: |
  First line of the system prompt.
  Second line.

  Blank lines are preserved.
  - Markdown formatting works
  - Lists, headers, code blocks — all valid

Testing a meeting definition

After editing meetings in your team repo's botminter.yml:

  1. Verify the meeting appears:

    bm meetings --help

  2. Run it:

    bm meetings <name>

To test changes to the profile source (for future teams), edit ~/.config/botminter/profiles/<profile>/botminter.yml, then create a new team with bm init to see the updated meetings.

Profile vs. team repo

Meetings are defined in the profile source (~/.config/botminter/profiles/<profile>/botminter.yml) and copied into the team repo during bm init. At runtime, bm meetings reads from the team repo's botminter.yml, not the profile on disk. To update meetings for an existing team, edit <team_path>/team/botminter.yml directly. To update them for future teams, edit the profile source and re-init.

Troubleshooting

"No meetings defined" : The active profile doesn't have a meetings section in botminter.yml. Add one or switch to a profile that includes meetings (e.g., agentic-sdlc-planning).

"Member not found for role" : The meeting references a role (e.g., engineer) but no member of that role is hired. Run bm hire <role> first.

"No workspace found" : Ensure members are hired with bm hire <role>. Session workspaces are created automatically when meetings start.