Delegate

The orchestrator's context is the one window that lasts the whole session. Every file it reads and every command output it holds is judgment budget spent. Sub-agents get a fresh window per task, so the orchestrator routes, defines done, and judges; the agents read, run, and write.

Two roles

Every dispatch prompt opens with Your ROLE_TYPE is sub-agent. That line is an anti-recursion marker: a sub-agent that inherits this skill must not fan out further. If your prompt opened that way, stop here and follow references/sub-agent-contract.md. Otherwise you are the delegator and the rest of this file applies.

When this applies

Any request that changes files, investigates a cause, gathers facts, fixes a bug, or reviews work — regardless of size — and any moment you are about to read source or run a diagnostic yourself instead of handing it off. "It's only two lines" is delegated. The one exception: a check scoped to a single file you edited yourself this turn.

Also applies once work is underway: judging a sub-agent's report (see Adjudicate), re-dispatching a phase, or generalizing a user-named pattern instance (see Pattern expansion).

Answer inline when the answer is already in your context and no file changes.

Decompose

Split the request into phases. Keep only the phases that produce work; never pad.

Phase	Produces
read	The material the work depends on, located and read
gather	External facts: docs, prior art, current system state
process	The analysis and the chosen approach
verify	The approach checked against the real code and environment
write	The change
validate	Lint, type-check, build results
test	Test runs, plus new tests covering the change
report	What changed, with evidence
review	Independent critique of the result

Some shapes recur and have their own handling:

• Bug fix → references/fix-cycle.md: reproduce before changing.
• Same edit across many targets → one process dispatch decides the change; N generic dispatches apply it; one review dispatch checks. See parallel-work.

Dispatch

• One phase per dispatch. A phase may fan out across N targets (N dispatches, same phase); it never blends with another phase.
• Send independent dispatches together in one turn so they run concurrently. Serialize only where one consumes another's result, or two would write the same file without isolation.
• Results from read/gather/process go to a file, not into your context. Pass the path to the next phase; do not forward the content.

Pick the agent

Classify by what the task asks of the agent, not by its name:

• Specialist — any agent whose description matches the phase's domain. Gets observations, success criteria, and context. Never gets implementation steps.
• Generic — general-purpose (or the harness equivalent) and Explore. Gets a prescribed implementation: exact edit, exact files, exact verification. Explore only for exact-match search.
• Reviewer — for the review phase, an agent different from the one that wrote, preferring a reviewer- or auditor-typed agent for the domain.

When no specialist fits, dispatch generic with a prescribed task.

Both prompts open with the same two lines — copy them verbatim onto the first line of whichever template follows: Your ROLE_TYPE is sub-agent. Follow the sub-agent contract at <absolute path to references/sub-agent-contract.md>.

Prompt — specialist mode

PHASE: <one of the phase names>
TASK: <one sentence>

OBSERVATIONS:
- <facts already in your context: user statements, prior STATUS reports, verbatim errors, file:line if known>

DEFINITION OF SUCCESS:
- <measurable outcome>
- <acceptance criteria>
- <how it is verified — a command and its expected result, or the reviewer that will check>

DELIVERY:
- Write anything longer than a line to .tmp/scratch/reports/<YYYYMMDD>-<slug>.md and return the path.

CONTEXT:
- Location: <where to look>
- Scope: <boundaries>
- Constraints: <user-mandated requirements; existing patterns to follow>
- Commands: <the project's quality gates for validate/test, or "discover the ones this project defines">

ECOSYSTEM CONTEXT:  (omit the section if empty)
- <session facts the agent cannot read anywhere: authenticated CLIs, a PR under review, another agent live on the same files>

YOUR TASK:
<the phase's row from the table below, verbatim>

Phase rows for YOUR TASK:

Phase	Row
read	Locate and read the material this work depends on. Write exact paths and quoted content to the delivery file; do not summarize away detail a later phase needs. Edit nothing.
gather	Collect the external facts named in CONTEXT. Record each with its source in the delivery file. Edit nothing.
process	Analyze the material at the paths in OBSERVATIONS. Choose an approach; record it and why alternatives were ruled out. Edit nothing.
verify	Check the chosen approach against the real code and environment in CONTEXT. Record where it holds and where it fails. Implement nothing.
write	Make the change in DEFINITION OF SUCCESS. Touch only files within CONTEXT Scope.
validate	Run the commands in CONTEXT Commands, or discover this project's lint/type/build gates and state which you ran. Report exact output, pass and fail. A silenced failure is a failure.
test	Run the test invocation in CONTEXT Commands, or discover it and state which you ran. Add tests covering the change. Report exact output.
report	State what changed and the evidence for it: files, commands, outputs. Make no claim the evidence does not support.
review	Critique the result at the path in OBSERVATIONS against DEFINITION OF SUCCESS. Report gaps, contradictions, unsupported claims. Fix nothing.

Rules for filling it in:

• A section you cannot fill from what is already in your context is omitted, not invented. Empty OBSERVATIONS or ECOSYSTEM CONTEXT is a valid state; a guess is not.
• OBSERVATIONS is pass-through: only what is already in your context. Reading, grepping, or running commands to fill it is pre-gathering; the agent does that with a fresh window.
• State observations as facts ("exit code 1", "the error text is: …"). Where you hold a hypothesis, label it: Hypothesis to verify: ….
• Constraints are outcomes and boundaries, never steps. Naming the project's own gate in Commands is a constraint, not a step.
• Say nothing the agent inherits: repo conventions, toolchain, "explore freely", "use available skills". Those live in the project's agent instructions. Name a skill only when the agent must load it and would not on its own.
• Paths: written as the agent will resolve them from its own working directory; relative inside the repo, and the symlink form (not the resolved target) for anything reached through a symlink.

Prompt — generic mode

PHASE: <write | validate | test | read>
TASK: <the exact instruction — the edit to make, the pattern to find, the command to run>

FILES:
- <exact paths>

DEFINITION OF SUCCESS:
- <the verification command and its expected result>

DELIVERY:
- Include the verification output in your report.

Adjudicate

Reports are claims. For each one:

• Check that the evidence supports the conclusion. "Tests pass" without the command output is not evidence; re-dispatch for the output.
• Judge the returned work; do not re-derive it. Re-reading what the agent read spends the context that delegating saved.
• Two reports conflict → find the falsifiable claim and dispatch a check for it. Confidence is not a tiebreaker.
• PARTIAL → re-dispatch the remainder, naming exactly what is left.
• BLOCKED on a missing input → supply it and re-dispatch. BLOCKED after attempts → change the approach or escalate to the user; do not resend the same prompt.

Re-dispatch the same phase at most twice on the same gap. After that, stop and report BLOCKED to the user with the gap named.

Every request that changed code gets an independent review, from a reviewer other than the writer.

Pattern expansion

A user pointing at one instance of a smell, bug, or missing check is naming a pattern. Unless they said "only this one": dispatch an audit of the whole file or module for the pattern, report the instances found, and confirm with the user before fixing beyond the named file.

Pointers

• references/sub-agent-contract.md — what dispatched agents follow.
• references/fix-cycle.md — the reproduce-first cycle for bug-fix dispatches.
• parallel-work — fan-out, fan-in, maker/checker, tournaments, loops with caps; also points to Claude Code harness mechanics.
• If orchestrator-discipline is installed: what the orchestrator may read and run; enforced by hooks.
• If process-siren is installed: writing decision points as evaluable Mermaid diamonds.