subagent-orchestration

Subagent orchestration — the leader's delegation playbook

You're the orchestrator. Your job isn't to do everything in one context — it's to decompose, dispatch, and synthesize. Done well this is force-multiplying; done carelessly it just burns tokens. This skill is how to do it well.

Pick the right primitive

Primitive	What it is	Best for
Subagent (Task/Agent tool)	A worker with its own isolated context; returns only a summary to you	Research/exploration, reading many files, a fresh-eyes review, isolating verbose output, independent parallel work
Agent team (experimental)	Several full sessions sharing a task list + mailbox; teammates talk to each other	Work that needs debate/coordination across layers, competing-hypothesis debugging
Background session / worktree	A separate claude you run/monitor	Big fan-out migrations, long isolated experiments

Default to subagents in an orchestrator-worker shape — it handles the most cases with the least coordination overhead. Reach for a team only when workers genuinely need to talk mid-flight.

When to parallelize vs stay serial

Parallelize (spawn multiple subagents in one message): understanding needs 10+ files; there are 3+ genuinely independent pieces; you want an unbiased second opinion; or distinct lenses on one artifact (security / perf / tests). Stay serial / single-session: steps are dependent (output feeds the next); edits to the same file (parallel writers clobber each other); the task is small; or phases share heavy context. Note: implementation coding often doesn't parallelize (shared context, dependencies) — research, review and audits do.

Write a complete delegation brief (the #1 failure is vagueness)

Every subagent prompt must carry four things, because a fresh subagent sees none of your context or files:

1. Objective — the one specific goal.
2. Output format — exactly how to return results (so you can merge them).
3. Tools / sources — what to use, what to prioritize, what to ignore (e.g. "skip vendor/").
4. Boundaries — its scope, so two workers don't collide or duplicate. Put must-have rules in the prompt — non-fork subagents don't read CLAUDE.md or your history. Always name the model on the dispatch itself (see model-router): an omitted model silently inherits the session's — usually the most capable and most expensive — model, defeating the point of offloading grunt work.

Scale effort to the task (don't spawn 20 agents for a one-liner)

Task	Agents
Simple fact / one file	1 (or just do it yourself)
Compare a few options	2–4 subagents
Broad / open-ended	many, with clearly divided scope
Teams: start 3–5 teammates, ~5–6 tasks each — "three focused beat five scattered."

Verify — the payoff of orchestration

After work is "done", dispatch a fresh subagent to review the diff against the plan — it sees only the diff + criteria, not the reasoning that made it, so it grades honestly. For findings, use two loops: one reviewer for spec-compliance, one for code-quality; hand all findings to a single fix-agent — never one fixer per finding, since each rebuilds context and re-runs the suites, and one real session's final-review fix wave cost more than all its tasks combined; re-run the same reviewer to confirm. Tell reviewers to flag only real correctness/requirement gaps (a reviewer told to "find problems" always finds some — that invites over-engineering). If you can't verify it, don't ship it.

Run it like a loop (not a one-shot)

• Worker return contract. Require each worker to end with exactly one status, each with a fixed controller response: DONE (verify, then accept) · DONE_WITH_CONCERNS (read the concern before accepting — don't wave it through) · NEEDS_CONTEXT (supply the missing piece, re-dispatch the same worker) · BLOCKED (assess — if the plan is wrong, escalate to the user; never blind-retry the same model unchanged). The rule under all four: if the worker said it's stuck, something must change — never ignore an escalation or force a retry on an unchanged prompt.
• Hand off via files, not chat. Write the task brief to a file under .skull/briefs/ and have the worker Read it; the worker writes its full report to its own file and returns only status + commit range + a one-line test summary + concerns. Reviewers/fix-agents Read & append that file — the brief and the diff never enter your context. Why it's not optional: everything you paste into a dispatch prompt, and everything a worker prints back, stays resident in your context for the rest of the session and is re-read every turn — one real session's dispatch hit 42k chars, of which 99% was pasted history.
• Pre-flight the plan once. Before task 1, scan the whole task set for contradictions/conflicts and surface them to the user in one batch — don't discover them mid-run.
• Reviewer hygiene — never pre-judge the finding. Copy the binding constraints verbatim into the reviewer prompt; hand the diff as a file; don't ask it to re-run tests already run. If the prompt you're writing to a reviewer contains "do not flag", "at most Minor", or "the plan chose X" — stop: you're pre-judging to spare yourself a review loop. When a finding conflicts with the plan, that's the human's call — present both, don't suppress one. Dispatch fixes for Critical/Important only; log Minor for the final whole-branch pass (top model, explicit).
• Keep a durable ledger. Append Task N: done (<base7>..<head7>, review clean) to a tracked file the instant a task passes. After a compaction/restart, trust the ledger + git log and never re-dispatch a completed task.

Economics (be honest about cost)

A subagent run costs more tokens than inline; a full multi-agent push can be ~10–15×. Token spend explains most of the quality gain — so only go multi-agent when the task's value justifies it. Pair this with model-router to put cheap models on cheap work.

Don'ts

Vague delegation · same-file parallel edits · over-decomposing a small task · too many overlapping specialists (auto-delegation gets unreliable) · letting every worker dump huge output back (re-bloats your context) · trusting without verifying.

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Credits / further reading (install alongside SKULL if you like them): Anthropic's multi-agent research system & subagents docs; the parallel-dispatch + two-loop-review patterns are sharpened in superpowers (obra/superpowers, MIT). See docs/ECOSYSTEM.md.