subagent-delegation

subagent-delegation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sammcj/agentic-coding. It costs 75 tokens per session (420 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for deciding when and how to delegate coding-agent work to sub-agents. Sub-agents are separate agents that can inspect or complete well-defined parts of a larger task.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan parallel investigations or implementation tasks, write sub-agent briefs, choose named or forked agents, and set boundaries for files and success criteria.
Why use it?
It helps split work safely by defining clear ownership, choosing suitable agents, and avoiding overlapping changes or poorly scoped assignments.

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/sammcj/agentic-coding/subagent-delegation
Any agent
npx skills add sammcj/agentic-coding --skill subagent-delegation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 subagent-delegation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sammcj/agentic-coding/subagent-delegation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sammcj/agentic-coding/subagent-delegation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sammcj/agentic-coding/subagent-delegation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sammcj/agentic-coding/subagent-delegation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 420 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 $0.00075 $0.00420
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00210
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00084
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00042

Measured 4d ago against content hash c4fddb5b7891, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

subagent-delegation 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.

Skills/subagent-delegation/SKILL.md · 30 lines

What it actually says

Sub-agent delegation

Delegation is authorised standingly (see CLAUDE.md). This skill covers how to do it well.

Briefing a sub-agent

  • Instruct them to return only key information
  • Define clear boundaries per agent. Specify which files each agent owns
  • Include "you are one of several agents" in instructions
  • Set explicit success criteria. Combine small updates to prevent over-splitting
  • Sub-agents can compete and erase each other's changes - ensure no overlap
  • If the task is simple and does not require careful consideration, reasoning or creativity (for example summarising simple web searches) you may use the sonnet model

Named vs forked

Named (standard) sub-agents have their own context window - good for parallel research, inspection, or separate features. Default to a named sub-agent.

A fork inherits the main session's full conversation history, system prompt, tools, and model. Output isolation is preserved (only the final result returns) but input isolation is lost.

Fork only when the accumulated nuance of the main conversation is genuinely useful to the subtask AND the task doesn't benefit from a fresh perspective.

  • Never fork code review, premise-checking, or any task that needs an adversarial reading - the fork inherits its own bias along with its context
  • Fork suits: parallel design variations that must respect prior decisions, MCP queries whose answer depends on session context, multi-step tangents you'd otherwise need to recap
  • Pass isolation: "worktree" when a fork will edit files speculatively, so its changes land in a separate git worktree instead of the working tree
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 · 30 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A c4fddb5b7891

Subscribe to this mod's changes

subagent-delegation is a skill published in the GitHub repository sammcj/agentic-coding (159 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 420 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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