delegating-work

delegating-work is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from mvschwarz/openrig. It costs 120 tokens per session (933 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A decision guide for choosing who should perform a task: the current agent, a spawned helper, or another agent that already has relevant context. It treats the amount of background reading as the main factor.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to route research, tracing, summarising, log scanning, mechanical extraction, and other tasks to the most suitable agent or helper.
Why use it?
It helps avoid giving a context-heavy task to a blank-slate helper or doing a small, self-contained task inefficiently. The guide also covers when delegation is appropriate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the openrig-core plugin — 16 skills 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/mvschwarz/openrig/delegating-work
Any agent
npx skills add mvschwarz/openrig --skill delegating-work
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mvschwarz/openrig

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install openrig-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for delegating-work

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mvschwarz/openrig/delegating-work.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mvschwarz/openrig/delegating-work)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mvschwarz/openrig/delegating-work"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mvschwarz/openrig/delegating-work.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 120 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 933 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 $0.00120 $0.00933
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.00466
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00187
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00093

Measured 4d ago against content hash 9809781b3ee8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

delegating-work 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 4d 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.

packages/daemon/assets/plugins/openrig-core/skills/delegating-work/SKILL.md · 44 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 44 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Delegating work — who should do this task?

The core question: context performance

Getting work done well is a context problem. The agent best suited to a task is the one who already holds the context that task requires. Before you spawn a subagent or grind it out yourself, ask who that is.

The decision

Ask: how much would a blank slate have to read in before it could do this correctly?

  • A lot to read in → route to a real agent in the topology that already holds it. This is what the role structure is FOR — reviewers, QA, implementers who have been on a project over time. An agent that already understands the work produces a better, safer result than any amount of briefing.
  • A little — a prompt plus light grounding is enough → spawn a subagent.
  • Genuinely unsure → err toward a real agent, or do it yourself.

Subagents are underused — reach for them far more

For self-contained work that is fully specifiable in the prompt, spawn a subagent instead of spending your own context: tracing, research, grounding passes, summarizing, scanning log files, searching, fetching, web search, mechanical extraction with citations. This is the common shape and it is under-used.

The failure mode — the part that matters most

Subagents start as blank slates, and you cannot anticipate everything they need to know. Give one a task where there is a lot to understand and it will have blind spots it does not know it has — it will complete the task and return a false conclusion, not from weakness but because it lacked the context to know what "correct" even looked like.

This is the unknown-unknowns problem, and it is the single most common subagent failure: a poorly-contextualized summary is worse than no summary, because it arrives looking like an answer. Overreliance on subagents for context-heavy work causes more problems than it solves — and a team burned by it stops using subagents at all, which is the wrong correction. The fix is not "avoid subagents"; it is "match the task to the context it needs."

Read the full file on GitHub · 44 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. 4d ago First seen · 44 lines · 120 tokens per session scan A 9809781b3ee8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

delegating-work is a skill published in the GitHub repository mvschwarz/openrig (65 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 120 tokens to every session and 933 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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