Dispatching subagents

Guidance for writing Agent tool calls (the Task tool was renamed Agent in v2.1.63; Task(...) still works as an alias). A subagent is a context-isolation tool: it spends tokens in its own window and returns a distilled summary, so your window stays clean. That isolation is also the failure surface — the delegation prompt is the only channel in, and the return summary is the only channel out. Keep both channels precise.

Platform mechanics: references/mechanics.md in this skill directory · Orchestration patterns: references/patterns.md in this skill directory · Verifier dispatch: references/verifier-dispatch.md in this skill directory

Host Mapping

Use the host's available subagent or delegation tool when present. If no such tool is available, work inline and state that the host has no subagent surface.

1. The dispatch gate

Agents cost roughly 4x the tokens of working inline; multi-agent fan-outs cost roughly 15x (Anthropic multi-agent research system). Delegation pays for itself only when isolation or parallelism buys something — multi-agent beat single-agent Opus by 90.2% on breadth-first research precisely because the task decomposed into independent directions. Deciding how to dispatch is itself the first dispatch decision.