dispatching-parallel-agents

A method for assigning separate, unrelated coding problems to multiple agents at the same time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to split test failures or bug investigations by file, subsystem, or problem area, then review and combine the results.
Why use it?
It reduces waiting when different failures or subsystems can be investigated independently.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-orchestration plugin — 3 skills, 1 command shipped together

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 skills/iofold/ainative-claude-plugins/dispatching-parallel-agents
Any agent
npx skills add iofold/ainative-claude-plugins --skill dispatching-parallel-agents
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/iofold/ainative-claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-orchestration, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 1 command.

Per session 97 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,206 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 $0.00097 $0.01206
Opus 5 $0.00048 $0.00603
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00241
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00121

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6845a2dacd04, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dispatching-parallel-agents 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 2d 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.

agent-orchestration/skills/dispatching-parallel-agents/SKILL.md · 151 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 151 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Dispatching Parallel Agents

Overview

When you have multiple unrelated failures (different test files, different subsystems, different bugs), investigating them sequentially wastes time. Each investigation is independent and can happen in parallel.

Core principle: Dispatch one agent per independent problem domain. Let them work concurrently.

The Pattern

1. Identify Independent Domains

Group failures by what's broken:

  • File A tests: Tool approval flow
  • File B tests: Batch completion behavior
  • File C tests: Abort functionality

Each domain is independent - fixing tool approval doesn't affect abort tests.

2. Create Focused Agent Tasks

Each agent gets:

  • Specific scope: One test file or subsystem
  • Clear goal: Make these tests pass
  • Constraints: Don't change other code
  • Expected output: Summary of what you found and fixed

3. Dispatch in Parallel

// In Claude Code / AI environment
Task("Fix agent-tool-abort.test.ts failures")
Task("Fix batch-completion-behavior.test.ts failures")
Task("Fix tool-approval-race-conditions.test.ts failures")
// All three run concurrently

4. Review and Integrate

When agents return:

  • Read each summary
  • Verify fixes don't conflict
  • Run full test suite
  • Integrate all changes

Agent Prompt Structure

Good agent prompts are:

  1. Focused - One clear problem domain
  2. Self-contained - All context needed to understand the problem
  3. Specific about output - What should the agent return?
Fix the 3 failing tests in src/agents/agent-tool-abort.test.ts:

1. "should abort tool with partial output capture" - expects 'interrupted at' in message
2. "should handle mixed completed and aborted tools" - fast tool aborted instead of completed
3. "should properly track pendingToolCount" - expects 3 results but gets 0

These are timing/race condition issues. Your task:

1. Read the test file and understand what each test verifies
2. Identify root cause - timing issues or actual bugs?
3. Fix by:
   - Replacing arbitrary timeouts with event-based waiting
   - Fixing bugs in abort implementation if found
   - Adjusting test expectations if testing changed behavior

Do NOT just increase timeouts - find the real issue.

Return: Summary of what you found and what you fixed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 151 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. 2d ago First seen · 151 lines · 97 tokens per session scan A 6845a2dacd04

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dispatching-parallel-agents is a skill published in the GitHub repository iofold/ainative-claude-plugins (3 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 97 tokens to every session and 1,206 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. 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.

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