Parallel agent delivery

Parallelism is a property of the work, not a preference. Establish it before dispatching.

When it is safe

All three must hold:

1. Disjoint write surfaces — no two agents touch the same file. Not "unlikely to conflict"; provably disjoint.
2. No sequential dependency — none needs another's output to start.
3. Independently verifiable — each result can be judged on its own.

Fail any one and run sequentially. Two agents editing one file produces a merge conflict at best and a silent lost update at worst.

Dispatching

Each agent gets a self-contained brief: the goal, its exclusive surface, the context it cannot see for itself, and the shape of the answer expected. Agents share no memory — anything you leave out is gone.

Ask for a structured return, the same shape from each, so results can be compared rather than re-read.

Read-only fan-out is the easy case

Searching, auditing, and reviewing have no write surface at all, so they parallelize without risk. Reach for parallelism here first and freely.

Integrating

• Review each result against its brief before merging any of them.
• Where two disagree on a shared fact, neither is authoritative — resolve it yourself.
• One agent returning nothing useful is a normal outcome, not a failure to retry blindly.

Sources

references/sources.md in this skill lists the outside authorities that settle the questions here — what each one is authoritative for, and what you may do with it. Check them before answering on anything they cover, and cite what you used. Most are free to read and not free to reproduce; the use note on each is binding.

Never

• Split work to look faster when the steps are actually sequential.
• Let two agents write to one surface because "they probably won't collide."
• Merge a result you have not read.