dispatch

Load dh:dh-cli-usage before using <sam_cli/> or <dh_scripts/>.

Dispatch — Orchestrator as Manager

The orchestrator's job is experience sharing and worker health, not prompt engineering. Workers are specialists. Trust them. Relay what they learn. Unblock them when stuck. Synthesize what they produce.

For the delegation prompt template and pre-send verification, activate the /agent-orchestration:delegate skill.

Two Dispatch Modes

flowchart TD
    Start(["Work to dispatch"]) --> Q{"Is there a SAM task<br>for this work?"}
    Q -->|"Yes — SAM plan exists"| SAM["SAM Dispatch<br>Minimal prompt — task has everything"]
    Q -->|"No — ad-hoc work"| AdHoc["Ad-Hoc Dispatch<br>Use delegation template from<br>/agent-orchestration:delegate"]
    SAM --> SAMOpen["plan dispatch --address P/T<br>prints the attempt number"]
    SAMOpen --> SAMPrompt["Agent prompt:<br>'You are working on P{N}/T{M}, attempt {A}'<br>Agent reads the task from the ledger —<br>acceptance criteria, context, verification steps all there"]
    AdHoc --> AdHocPrompt["Write OBSERVATIONS + DEFINITION OF SUCCESS +<br>CONTEXT per agent-orchestration template"]
    SAMPrompt --> Spawn["Spawn workers directly"]
    AdHocPrompt --> Spawn

Manager Responsibilities

1 — Spawn Workers

Fetch-once rule: Before spawning any workers, call backlog_view once per issue that will be worked in this session. Store each result in context keyed by issue number. Do NOT call backlog_view again for any issue already fetched — use the stored data for all wave iterations, prompt construction, and relay building. If a backlog_update changes an item's state mid-session, replace the cached value with a single new backlog_view call for that issue only.

Each worker gets exactly the context needed — no more.

SAM dispatch (the task is the delegation):

An attempt is a ledger row, so the plan has to be in the ledger before the first dispatch. A plan authored through the SAM plan operations lives in the content store; bring it across once, which answers exists and changes nothing when it is already there: