Make subagent spawning and delegation rules explicit across the workflow

[jaedol-claw]

Problem

The plugin already uses subagents, teammates, and specialized roles heavily, but the rules for when work should stay in the current session versus be delegated are still not fully explicit.

That can lead to inconsistency:

• some tasks are delegated too late
• some small tasks may be over-delegated
• multi-source reading may happen in the main session even when a detached lane would be better
• role-specific agents may be bypassed inconsistently

Why this matters

With Claude Opus 4.6, delegation quality improves when spawn decisions are explicitly described instead of relying on ambient workflow taste.

Clear delegation rules help with:

• context efficiency
• role isolation
• better fan-out for parallelizable work
• more predictable execution behavior

Proposed solution

Define explicit spawn/delegate rules across the workflow, including:

• when main session should act directly
• when to spawn a retrieval/debug/review/wiki agent
• when teammate fan-out is preferred
• when parallel batches are appropriate
• when tasks are too broad and should escalate back to planning

This should be documented in a reusable policy rather than remaining distributed across implication-heavy skill prose.

Scope

In scope:

• direct-vs-delegate rules
• parallel fan-out guidance
• multi-source reading delegation
• escalation back to planning when scope is too large

Out of scope:

• changing the plugin into a fully autonomous multi-agent platform
• forcing delegation for every small task

Success criteria

• delegation behavior becomes more predictable
• context-heavy work is moved out of the main session more consistently
• unnecessary subagent spawning decreases
• parallel work is used more intentionally

[jaedol-claw]

A practical way to make this actionable is to define a delegation matrix.

For example:

• direct in main session when the task is small, local, and already visible
• spawn retrieval-agent when the task requires multi-source reading or evidence gathering
• spawn reviewer/tracer/wiki-maintainer when the work is specialized and detached
• fan out in parallel only when the results can later be recombined cleanly
• escalate back to planning when the requested change is broader than the current workflow lane

This could live as a short policy table that both skills and hooks reference.

Likely files to inspect:

• skills/implement/SKILL.md
• skills/debug/SKILL.md
• skills/add-feature/SKILL.md
• hooks/teammate-dispatcher.mjs
• hooks/subagent-start.mjs
• any future retrieval-agent definition

The key benefit is not just efficiency. It is making delegation behavior more predictable for Claude Opus 4.6 so orchestration feels intentional rather than ad hoc.