Agent Coordination
May 23, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
Beyond doing the work, the agent has tools for organising the work - planning multi-step jobs, delegating to specialists, spawning subagents, and pausing to ask the user when something is genuinely ambiguous.
Tools in the family
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
todo_write | Maintain a structured TODO list across a long task. Marked done as work progresses. |
spawn_subagent | Spin up a fresh agent with its own context window for a self-contained subtask. |
spawn_worker_thread | Background work that doesn't need to block the main conversation. |
delegate | Hand a task to a specialist (e.g. an archetype with different prompts/tools/permissions). |
archetype_delegation | Route to a named archetype - coder, researcher, planner, etc. |
skill_delegation | Hand off to a skill installed in the workspace. |
ask_clarification | Pause and ask the user a precise question instead of guessing. |
plan_exit | Exit a planning phase and start executing. |
check_onboarding_status / complete_onboarding | Gate behaviour on whether the user has finished onboarding. |
spawn_subagent and archetype delegation calls accept an optional model field for a one-off exact model pin. If it is omitted, the harness uses config-level per-agent pins when present and otherwise falls back to the normal model-routing hints.
Why these are tools, not implicit behaviour
Long tasks fall apart when the agent tries to keep everything in one head. Splitting work via TODOs and subagents means:
- Each subagent gets a clean context - fewer tokens, fewer distractions.
- The main thread keeps a high-level view of progress.
- Failures in one branch don't poison the rest.
Asking for clarification is a tool too, on purpose: it makes "I should ask the user" a visible decision the agent can be steered toward, not an emergent behaviour.
See also
- Coder - what a coder-archetype subagent typically uses.
- Subconscious Loop - the always-on background agent thread.