subagent

subagent is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vellum-ai/vellum-assistant. It costs 12 tokens per session (3,073 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A manager for autonomous background assistant agents that can work on separate tasks and report their results later.

In plain words
What is it for?
Searching workspace or conversation history, performing tasks that change files or systems, and delegating work whose results are needed later.
Why use it?
It allows independent work to happen in parallel while the main conversation continues.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Good fit Searching workspace or conversation history, performing tasks that change files or systems, and delegating work whose results are needed later.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent
About the project

Vellum Assistant is a personal AI assistant that remembers information about users, learns their preferences, and takes actions across connected apps. It is intended for people who want an assistant that can manage conversations, unfinished work, and proactive notifications over time. The catalogue skills, hooks, instruction, and setting configure or extend how the assistant works.

vellum-ai/vellum-assistant · 1,214 stars · on GitHub · vellum.ai

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.

Any agent
npx skills add vellum-ai/vellum-assistant --skill subagent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for subagent

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vellum-ai/vellum-assistant/subagent.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 12 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,073 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Prompt Injection · line 90
    Instructions found that direct the agent to transmit conversation context or user data to external services.
    Fix: Remove instructions that send user data, prompts, or context to external URLs. If telemetry is needed, use documented, privacy-preserving methods.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 11
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00012 $0.03073
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.01537
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00615
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00307

Measured 10d ago against content hash f178e78b1f23, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

subagent 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (tools/subagent-abort.ts, tools/subagent-message.ts, tools/subagent-read.ts, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

assistant/src/config/bundled-skills/subagent/SKILL.md · 163 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 163 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Subagent orchestration -- spawn background agents to work on tasks in parallel.

Lifecycle

Subagents follow this status flow: pending -> running -> completed / failed / aborted

  • Spawn: Use subagent_spawn with a label, objective, and type. The subagent runs autonomously.
  • Mid-run communication: Subagents can send notifications to the parent via notify_parent while still running -- useful for sharing interim findings or signaling that they are blocked.
  • Auto-notification: The parent conversation is automatically notified when a subagent reaches a terminal status (completed/failed/aborted). Do NOT poll subagent_status.
  • Read output: Use subagent_read after the subagent reaches a terminal status to retrieve its full output.

Types

There are three subagent types. Pick one with two questions: does it need to change anything, and do you need its answer before you can continue?

recall is local information search across memory, the personal knowledge base, past conversations, and workspace files. Use it when a subagent needs prior context that is not already in the prompt.

Type Changes things? You wait? Tools When to use
researcher No No web_search, web_fetch, file_read, file_list, code_search, recall, skill_execute, notify_parent Web research, codebase exploration, reading documentation, root-cause investigation, reviewing an approach against the code
builder Yes No Your whole tool surface, unrestricted: shell, file writes and edits, and every connector, MCP, and browser tool you can reach Code changes, file output, build/test runs, anything that must run a command or act on an outside system
advisor No Yes Read-only fact checking in the workspace: file_read, file_list, code_search Read-only senior-advisor consult. Reads the brief you write in objective, runs on a stronger model, and BLOCKS until it returns guidance

Read the full file on GitHub · 163 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files 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. 10d ago First seen · 163 lines · 12 tokens per session scan A f178e78b1f23

Subscribe to this mod's changes

subagent is a skill published in the GitHub repository vellum-ai/vellum-assistant (1,214 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 12 tokens to every session and 3,073 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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