delegate-work

Delegate Work

Delegate only work that is independent enough to finish in an isolated context.

Scope the task

• Give one concrete goal and one deliverable.
• Provide observable acceptance criteria.
• Pass only the workspace paths and context required for the task.
• State explicit non-goals in constraints.
• Never copy the full conversation into context_summary.
• Split unrelated deliverables into separate delegations.

Do not delegate requests such as "investigate everything", "fix all issues", or "continue helping with this project". Narrow them first.

Select a profile

• Use analyst for data inspection, computation, experiments, and generated artifacts. It can use the session Code Interpreter.
• Use reviewer for an independent read-only review. It cannot execute code or modify source files.

Select task complexity

• Use low for narrow extraction, classification, or simple checks.
• Use medium for normal analysis and review work.
• Use high only for genuinely difficult reasoning or broad synthesis.
• Omit task_complexity when the delegated agent should inherit the parent model unchanged.

Execute

Call delegate_task once. It returns an acceptance receipt immediately. Continue the foreground conversation without waiting for completion. Never expose or invent internal job identifiers; they are orchestration metadata owned by the activity UI and backend.

Use get_delegation only when the user asks for status or the result is needed before another decision. Filter by profile or distinctive goal text. Use cancel_delegation only for an explicit request to cancel a background job; if multiple jobs match, narrow the goal instead of guessing.

Boundaries

• Do not delegate recursively.
• Do not use delegation for Gmail, Calendar, Notion, GitHub writes, OAuth, or other external side effects.
• Do not ask the subagent to modify files outside its output directory.
• Do not assume an interrupt of the foreground response cancels an accepted delegation.
• Treat the mailbox completion as the authoritative terminal result.