Delegation — a delegate is a partner

A delegate starts with nothing but what you hand it. Give it the why, not just the what: what you are trying to achieve and for whom, the constraints that bind, the traps a smart newcomer would walk into, and how the result will be proved. An instruction-only brief ("change X to Y") gets X changed to Y even when Y is not what you wanted. A brief with the goal in it comes back with judgement: "the force at replay end is redundant, here is why", "a 30px overlay would cover the last line, which is worse than the jump" — each of which changed what shipped (2026-08-21, a remote-control product). That is the return on a brief's length: not compliance, judgement.

Manage a delegate the way a good owner manages you: goal and context, not step-by-step; trust its judgement on the means; push back where you disagree; its view is not binding.

The mechanics of each delegate live in their own skills: codex-agents, grok-agents and claude-agents (each CLI driven headless from another agent as a peer, builder or reviewer), and independent-review (the unsteered review loop, run by default through the Grok CLI or a fresh headless Claude session). This skill is what they share.

What never delegates

• Deciding what the product should do — thesis, scope, taste, what the owner wants.
• Accepting or rejecting a review finding. A finding is a claim, its severity included (independent-review § Triage).
• Anything that touches a real system, development included — a deploy or a promotion, a migration applied to any database (a development project only you use included), a server or worker and its secrets, a live configuration, a drill. The delegate builds each so it is one command and names the commands; you run them. (2026-10-23 and 24, a monitoring product: every stage brief listed these under "What stays with me". Delegated builds made 28 commits the day before the first release and none on the day of five production promotions, which was review fixes and real systems throughout.)
• Final verification. The tests, the typecheck, the gate, the smoke run on your own eyes. "It says it passes" is a claim to check, never a result.
• The judgement that a stage is done.

When it is worth handing off: size, not time

If the brief would be nearly as long as the diff, write the diff. Delegation costs a hand-off: the delegate rediscovers the file, the conventions and the surrounding code before it changes anything. (2026-08-21: having already found the exact lines, an agent wrote a 60-line brief and waited twenty minutes for a change it could have made in two.)