_subagent-discovery

A shared procedure for finding the right helper agent for a task by reading agent descriptions in a project.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing helper agents during planning, task creation, and implementation. It scans the project's subagent files and matches their described purpose to the task.
Why use it?
It avoids fixed agent names that may not exist or may change between projects.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/chappygo-os/atomic-spec/_subagent-discovery
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Chappygo-OS/Atomic-Spec
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 992 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00992
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00496
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00198
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00099

Measured 3d ago against content hash ea73e033f551, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

_subagent-discovery scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

templates/commands/_subagent-discovery.md · 73 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 73 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dynamic Subagent Discovery Protocol

Shared sub-routine — referenced by /atomicspec.plan, /atomicspec.tasks, and /atomicspec.implement.

Constitutional basis: Per the framework's design (see CLAUDE.md), subagents are matched to tasks by semantic similarity between task keywords and each agent's description frontmatter. Hardcoded folder → agent routing tables are FORBIDDEN because they break when a consumer project adds new subagents, renames existing ones, or targets a platform (e.g., mobile) whose agent set differs from the web defaults.


When to run this protocol

Whenever a command needs to pick a subagent for a task (planning, task generation, or implementation execution). Do not hardcode agent names in command templates. Do not assume a specific agent exists.

The protocol

Step 1 — Scan

List every **/*.md file under .specify/subagents/ recursively. Exclude any file whose name starts with _ (those are shared templates or routing hints, not agents).

Step 2 — Extract

For every discovered file, read the YAML frontmatter and capture:

  • name — the subagent identifier
  • description — what it does and when to use it
  • model (optional) — preferred model

Build an in-memory list: [{name, description, path}].

Step 3 — Derive task keywords

From the task under consideration, extract:

  • Objective verbs and nouns from the task title and description (e.g., "create repository", "add API endpoint", "wire React component")
  • File paths in "Files to Create / Modify" (e.g., repositories/, routes/, components/, migrations/, workers/)
  • Technical terms in the implementation steps (e.g., "SQL", "WebSocket", "OAuth", "Stripe", "push notification", "Core Data")
  • Platform signals from plan.md (e.g., iOS / Android / web / backend) — these narrow the candidate pool

Step 4 — Match and score

For each candidate agent, score by keyword overlap between the task keywords and the agent description:

Read the full file on GitHub · 73 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 73 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A ea73e033f551

Subscribe to this mod's changes

_subagent-discovery is a command published in the GitHub repository Chappygo-OS/Atomic-Spec (10 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 992 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.