| name | ruflo-swarm-dispatch |
| description | Use when deciding between built-in Agent parallelism and ruflo-swarm for multi-agent tasks. Default is always the built-in Agent tool. Ruflo swarm is the escalation path for consensus-required or state-sharing tasks only. |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"author":"prism","version":"1.0"} |
Decide the right parallelism strategy and dispatch multi-agent work.
Default: built-in Agent tool (use 90% of the time)
Most agent runtimes provide built-in parallel agent or tool calls for independent subtasks. This handles:
- Research and exploration across multiple areas
- Reading multiple files or codebases simultaneously
- Running independent tests or checks
- Any task where subtasks share no state and need no consensus
No shared memory, no coordination overhead, no Ruflo required.
Escalate to ruflo-swarm when ALL of the following are true:
- Consensus needed — subtasks must agree on an approach before proceeding (e.g., three agents reviewing the same refactor must reach one answer)
- Shared intermediate state — one agent's output must inform another agent's work within the same dispatch
- Overlapping artifact risk — independent agents would modify the same file and create conflicting edits
If any condition is absent, fall back to the built-in Agent tool.
Do NOT use ruflo-swarm for:
- Pure exploration or research (built-in Agent is faster and cheaper)
- Independent test runs (use
Bash background jobs)
- Tasks where a single agent suffices
ruflo-swarm dispatch command
source ~/.claude/ruflo/lib/tags.sh
ruflo swarm dispatch \
--topology mesh \
--tags "$(ruflo_key_prefix)|openspec:<change-id>" \
"<task description>"
Use --topology hierarchical when one coordinator agent should direct workers (e.g., a planner + two implementers). Use --topology mesh for peer agents that must reach consensus.
After dispatch
The swarm result is written to AgentDB automatically. To retrieve:
ruflo memory search -q "<task description> swarm result"
