Effective Subagent Delegation
Balanced Delegation
Delegate when a question is independently answerable, read-heavy, repetitive, parallelizable, or benefits from independent review. Keep tiny, tightly coupled actions with the controller when setup and review would cost more than the work.
Launch Checklist
Before launch, define:
- one exact question or bounded objective;
- allowed sources and mutation boundaries;
- one owner for every mutable surface;
- the required result artifact and evidence;
- blocker and stop conditions; and
- who accepts or rejects the result.
Parallel workers may explore or review the same problem, but only one should write a given file set. Make independent reviewers read-only.
Completion
Treat workers as asynchronous. Require one terminal result or clear blocker, continue non-overlapping work, and consume the result when notified. Do not launch monitoring-only workers or create sleep and polling loops.
A submitted task or completion notice is not acceptance. The controller must review evidence, resolve uncertainty, and record durable learning in the owning project.
Anti-Patterns
- Choosing the most expensive profile before understanding the task.
- Assuming a profile name proves the active model or effort.
- Giving two workers overlapping write ownership.
- Asking a worker to monitor another worker indefinitely.
- Letting a read-only worker make policy or state-changing decisions.
- Reconstructing a missing result from memory without labeling the gap.