delegate-work

Delegate Work and Verify What Comes Back

Your only view of delegated work is the delegate's own account of it. That account is written by the one party with an interest in it reading as complete, from a context you cannot inspect, and it is silent in exactly the places where it is wrong. A report that says nothing about instruction four is indistinguishable from a report whose author never received instruction four.

The defense is not skepticism, it is structure: make each instruction produce a named artifact, then check the artifacts instead of reading the prose.

research-it owns what a delegated conclusion is worth (a claim, not evidence). prove-checks owns whether a check could have gone red. This skill owns the orchestrator's side of the exchange: the brief, the delivery, and the report as a whole.

Trigger

• A prompt for a subagent, a background agent, or a parallel session is about to be written.
• Two or more agents will run against the same repository or worktree.
• A correction, a scope change, or a new instruction was sent to an agent that is already running.
• A returned report is about to be relayed to a user, quoted, or used as the input to the next delegation.
• The delegated work is expensive enough that re-running it is not the cheap fix.

Not this skill: measuring what a run cost (audit-agent), proving a green check was capable of failing (prove-checks), or deciding whether a technical claim the delegate made is actually true (research-it).

Procedure

1. Hoist the standing guardrail block out of the brief

Anything repeated into a second brief is written down once and referenced, never retyped. Four hand-copied blocks are four blocks that will drift, and the drift is invisible: each brief looks right on its own.

Keep one file (a shared brief fragment, a section of AGENTS.md, or a skill the brief names) covering the categories below. The instances are project-specific; the categories are not.

Category	What it must settle
Isolation	Which worktree or directory the agent owns, and that it owns it alone.
Forbidden commands	The exact commands that would destroy a parallel session's uncommitted work. Name them; "be careful with git" is not an instruction.
Gate selection	How this project's checks choose the files they check, when that differs from "everything".
Evidence standard	Real command output pasted, not paraphrased. A summary of a gate run is not a gate run.
Negative control	Required before any green counts. Defer to prove-checks rather than restating it.
Incremental findings	Findings written to a file as they accumulate. Defer to the working agreement's reporting rule rather than restating it.