parallel-agent-delivery

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.

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.