Multi-agent orchestration with delegate-task

Prereq

Hermes Agent 1.0+ or Codex CLI with delegate support
Anthropic / OpenAI / OVTH key
A task big enough to split

Steps

01. Sketch the parent prompt

The parent’s job is planning and synthesis, not execution.

markdown

You are the lead agent. Break the task into 3 independent subtasks.
For each, spawn a subagent via delegate_task with:
- a specific deliverable
- the exact files it may touch
- a success check
Then merge the summaries into one PR description.

02. Delegate with scoped briefs

json

{
"tool": "delegate_task",
"args": {
  "agent": "worker",
  "task": "Refactor src/auth/session.ts to use new token schema. Return diff only.",
  "allowed_paths": ["src/auth/**"],
  "budget_tokens": 40000
}
}

03. Parallelize where safe

bash

# Three subagents, three independent scopes
delegate-task --task "update payment module" --paths "src/payment/**" &
delegate-task --task "update shipping module" --paths "src/shipping/**" &
delegate-task --task "update notifications" --paths "src/notify/**" &
wait

Keep scopes disjoint. Merge conflicts between subagents are a you problem.

04. Synthesize in the parent

Parent reads the three summaries (not the full transcripts), writes the PR description, runs the test suite, opens the PR.

05. Use git as the integration bus

Each subagent commits to its scoped branch. Parent merges them in order. git is the shared memory; no in-memory coordination needed.

The real bottleneck is context, not compute. A 200k-token window sounds big until you watch it evaporate on tool outputs.
Parent pollution — if the parent reads every subagent’s stdout, its context explodes and reasoning degrades. Keep subagent output summarized before it reaches parent.
Budget per task, not per run — budget_tokens: 40000 forces the subagent to focus. Unlimited budget = unlimited scope creep.
One clean context beats a huge one. A subagent starting fresh with a narrow brief outperforms a parent with 150k of accumulated noise.
Failure isolation. If one subagent loops, you kill it and respawn. The parent’s state survives.
Cost angle: three 40k-token subagents via Haiku cost less than one 150k-token Opus run, and often finish faster.

Hermes Agent Telegram orchestration
Pattern: supervisor + workers + critic