subagents

A skill for asking separate helper agents to handle substantial, independent pieces of work. Each helper receives its own complete instructions and reports back to the main agent.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a task has self-contained research, coding, or analysis parts that can be delegated and reviewed separately.
Why use it?
It helps divide work that can safely happen independently. Clear briefs and isolated work areas reduce confusion between concurrent changes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/openpi-dev/openpi/subagents
Any agent
npx skills add openpi-dev/openpi --skill subagents
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/openpi-dev/openpi

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 555 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 $0.00029 $0.00555
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00278
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00111
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash 19a54f9fa27c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

subagents 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.

skills/subagents/SKILL.md · 22 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 22 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Subagents

The tool definitions are canonical for parameters, limits, model syntax, isolation, and lifecycle commands. This skill governs delegation decisions only.

  • Delegate substantial independent work, not a lookup or edit the parent can do directly.
  • Give the child a standalone prompt with paths, constraints, relevant context, and the expected report; it cannot see the parent conversation or ask the user.
  • Inherit the parent model by default. When choosing the child's reasoning effort, honor an explicit user requirement first; otherwise use the selected role's relative guidance and the task's difficulty, choosing from levels supported by the resolved child model.
  • Prefer a matching agent type when one exists; its tool restriction is enforced. Model precedence is explicit spawn override, selected type-file model, configured built-in role model, then parent model. Reasoning precedence is explicit spawn override, selected type default, then parent effort. Types live in ~/.pi/agent/agents/*.md and, for trusted projects, .pi/agents/*.md; see Agent types.
  • Isolate concurrent writers in worktrees according to the subagent_spawn schema so they cannot overwrite one checkout or git index. While Plan Mode is active, use only read-only exploration types (or no type); worktree isolation and types narrowed by Plan Mode are rejected.
  • After spawning, continue useful parent work. In an interactive session, if none remains, tell the user the child is still running and end the turn; automatic result delivery will re-invoke the parent when it settles. Do not block merely because the next step depends on the result or because there is nothing else to do. Use subagent_wait only when the user explicitly asks to keep the current response open for the result, or when non-interactive automation must return it in the same invocation.

Worktree isolation

Concurrent writers without isolation share the same checkout and Git index, so edits and git add operations can overwrite each other. Set isolation: "worktree" and tell every writing child to commit.

Read the full file on GitHub · 22 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 · 22 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 19a54f9fa27c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

subagents is a skill published in the GitHub repository openpi-dev/openpi (100 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 555 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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