How Delegation Works¶
Delegation is one of the harness's core functions — see How It Works for the full architecture overview.
Delegation¶
The orchestrator delegates work to worker agents — ephemeral context windows loaded with curated skills and conventions per-task. For compound requests, the orchestrator spawns multiple workers in parallel for independent subtasks and keeps dependency-gated steps sequential. For measured cost impact, see Cost Evidence.
flowchart TD
Request[Incoming Request] --> Q1{Benefits from\nfresh context?}
Q1 -->|No| Direct[Handle Directly]
Q1 -->|Yes| Skills[Select skills from registry]
Skills --> Spawn[Spawn worker with\nskills + conventions + scope]
Spawn --> Execute[Worker executes task]
Execute --> Review[Orchestrator reviews results]
Direct --> Review
Review --> Capture[Knowledge capture]| Orchestrator | Worker Agent |
|---|---|
| Understand user intent | Execute delegated task |
| Select relevant skills | Load what orchestrator specifies |
| Coordinate multi-worker flows | Stay within scope boundaries |
| Handle knowledge capture | Report gotchas and findings |
Knowledge-First Gating¶
Before spawning a worker, the orchestrator searches the knowledge base. If results directly answer the question, the orchestrator responds without delegating — avoiding unnecessary worker overhead. Workers are spawned only when execution, fresh context, or parallelism is needed.
Subagent Context Contract¶
Workers receive what the orchestrator specifies: task description, skill file paths, convention file paths, and scope boundaries. docs/context/agent-rules.md is injected into the orchestrator's session banner; workers receive conventions and skills selected by the orchestrator per-task.
Per-Platform Model Configuration¶
Worker agent tiers (lore-worker, lore-worker-fast, lore-worker-powerful) and their models are configured via subagentDefaults in .lore/config.json — not via agent frontmatter. See Configuration: subagentDefaults.
Session Acceleration¶
flowchart TB
subgraph P1["Phase 1: Foundation"]
P1a[Explore integrations]
P1b[Hit gotchas, create first skills]
P1c["Heavy discovery cost"]
end
subgraph P2["Phase 2: Specialization"]
P2a[Workers handle delegated tasks]
P2b[Context knowledge fills in]
P2c["Balanced: execute + delegate"]
end
subgraph P3["Phase 3: Full Context"]
P3a[Orchestrator delegates most work]
P3b[Full context]
P3c["Minimal discovery, maximum leverage"]
end
P1 --> P2 --> P3