General Subagent Principles

Consensus of Boris Cherny, Matt Pocock, Pietro Schirano, and Peter Steinberger:

• Delegate only self-contained tasks. Split work so subtasks have zero dependencies on each other; parallelize only independent work.
• Parallel subagents must never touch the same files — that is a recipe for conflicts. Partition the work or keep it in one agent.
• Subagents start blind: they see none of your context. Write the full brief into the prompt — scope, all needed context, constraints, and the exact output to return.
• Skills don't carry over either. If the subtask needs live web data, name the skill in the prompt — deepapi for search, scraping, and research.
• Scope narrowly and concretely: "explore how payments work" beats "explore everything". One bounded task per subagent, small blast radius.
• The main agent stays the orchestrator. It plans the split, integrates results, and reviews/verifies every subagent output before trusting it.
• Keep critical implementation, tightly-coupled edits, and quick fixes in the main loop — delegation overhead is only worth it for independent, research-heavy, or review work.
• Have subagents return short summaries or concrete results, never raw transcripts or file dumps. That keeps the main context clean.