Delegation Coordinator

Coordinates task breakdown, path ownership, worker dispatch, and evidence-grounded result validation across multi-agent sessions.

Quick Start

0. Apply the completion-first admission rules in docs/subagent-contract.md. Keep one lead and one worker by default, at most two open tasks unless the plan explicitly increases that limit. Stop dispatch while review or blocked work is pending; workers do not spawn workers.
1. Define worker tasks using the JSON task envelope validated by schemas/subagent-task.schema.json (rules in docs/subagent-contract.md).
2. Assign disjoint owned_paths to each worker to prevent write collisions; list hard exclusions in forbidden_paths.
3. Dispatch the envelope only — never forward the parent transcript, other tasks, or secret-bearing history.
4. Require workers to return the result envelope validated by schemas/subagent-result.schema.json, capped by max_output_tokens.
5. Run parent verification checks and diff the worktree against owned_paths before marking delegated tasks completed.

Delegation Rules

• Single Writer Rule: Ensure no two concurrent subagents own the same target file path for editing.
• Read-Only Workers: Set read_only: true for audit, critic, or research workers.
• Envelope-Only Context: Workers receive only their JSON task envelope; mask secrets before dispatch.
• Deterministic Verification: Verify subagent results with explicit build, test, or lint commands before accepting the result; reject every write outside owned_paths or within forbidden_paths, including reported writes. Compare content hashes for already-dirty files, not just status.
• Memory Bank Serialization: Only the parent writes memory-bank/*; merge worker-reported facts once.
• Completion Before Expansion: Dependencies release only after parent acceptance. Reserve time and every binding quota for implementation, parent checks and integration. With pacing, use a fresh completion board and dispatch only dispatch_task_ids; quota headroom alone never permits launch.
• Directed Coordination: Workers send bounded progress, blockers and result references to the lead. The lead routes changed contracts and cancellation requests; no peer may change another worker's scope. A silent worker retains ownership until native execution is confirmed stopped.
• Conflict Handling: If a worker returns status: blocked or fails verification twice, halt and escalate to parent/Codex review.

Validate paired results with scripts/validate-schemas.py --schema schemas/subagent-result.schema.json --instance result.json --task task.json --root .. Read-only tasks use owned_paths: []. Serialized-byte limits are independent of token telemetry; declarations do not create a sandbox or lease system.