subagent-returns

Purpose

A calling agent reads the message you end on, and it reads nothing else you wrote. So that message is a return value the caller acts on, rather than a report a person reads at leisure. This skill holds it to what the caller needs.

Read these rules for that message alone. A file you leave for another agent to open is a different channel, and the rules below do not govern it.

The final message is the whole delivery

• Put every fact the caller needs into the final message, because nothing else you wrote reaches it.
• Point at a file the caller can open, rather than pasting the contents that file already holds.
• Paste the text whose exact wording the caller must act on, and summarise the rest.

Fill the shape the caller asked for

• Fill the return format the spawn prompt gave, field for field.
• Add no section the caller did not ask for.
• Answer a three-line question in three lines, under no heading.
• Return the data itself where the caller named no shape, and do not invent a report around it.

Carry the data, and not the journey

• Cut the restatement of the task, because the caller wrote it.
• Cut the account of the order you worked in, and return what you found.
• Cut the closing summary, because the caller has just read the message.

Say where each claim came from

• Mark a claim you inferred, in the clause that makes it.
• State a count beside the command or the file it came from, in the same clause.
• Report what a check reported, and never what you expect it to report.
• State what you did not cover in one line, and where the caller's shape has no room for it, the shape wins.

A caller re-runs a measured claim cheaply and re-derives an inference expensively. A message that blurs the two moves that cost onto the caller.

A failure is a result

• Return a blocked run as data: what you attempted, what you observed, and the smallest thing that would let it continue.
• Name a step you skipped, because silence about it reads as a step you took.
• Leave the apology out, and let the failure state itself.

Length answers to the caller's decision

• Size the message to what the caller must decide, and not to the work it took.
• Cut a line the caller would not act on.

Work you did buys no words. A long return is not a report on effort, and a caller reading one pays for every line of it.

What this skill does not ask for

• Do not drop a finding to make the return shorter.
• Do not shorten a shape the caller asked for.

How this differs from the other craft skills

de-slop treats one passage of prose and compressed-deliberation treats one reply, and each writes for a person. proportionate-execution governs a whole session. This skill treats the one message a calling agent receives. Follow all four. They do not disagree.

What stands behind these rules

Nothing measured. A craft rule has no standard behind it, so measurement is the only evidence it can ever have, and no arm has been run for this skill.

Read every rule here as discipline that we assert. Do not read any of it as an effect that we observed.

Boundary

This skill has no external standard behind it. Every rule in it is our own editorial guidance, and the trace marks the rest as narrative that asserts no rule. The trace lives in the stylewright repository at grounding/craft/subagent-returns.md. It is not installed with this skill.