delegate

name	delegate
description	Govern the fan-out to subagents — ensure the dispatch is a coherent spec, not an ad-hoc spray, before anything is spawned. CENTROID: orchestrator-as-delegator gate — govern the swarm/tranche spec before dispatch. IS: - the orchestration checkpoint: brief quality, slice soundness, synthesis contract - the Decomposition Stress Test: naming what the chosen cut GETS WRONG, not just what it correctly excludes - the verify-don't-trust-done contract: the parent's independent verification protocol for each subagent's result - posture + ingest scoping for each subagent before any work begins IS NOT: collapse_zones: - swarm executor (delegate governs the spec; spawning is downstream) - brief author (delegate governs brief quality; content is the orchestrator's) - synthesis agent (delegate specifies how verification happens; it does not do the cross-agent verification — that is the parent's execution responsibility) - scope auditor (delegate does not audit individual subagent scopes for correctness; it audits whether the decomposition leaves structural seam gaps) sibling_overlaps: - /counter (counter attacks a single move's premises; delegate attacks the structural soundness of a FAN-OUT — seam gaps, blind spots, runtime leaks that exist because of how the slicing was done) - /complement (complement maps missing expressions after a move; delegate checks whether the fan-out set is complete BEFORE dispatch — different lifecycle position) - /preflight (preflight gates pre-mutation readiness from the repo-evidence angle; delegate gates pre-dispatch soundness from the decomposition-quality angle — both fire before action, different axes) WHEN: - when an orchestrator is about to fan a goal out to subagents (spawn, swarm, tranche, parallelize, delegate, decompose, break down into agents) - when a swarm or tranche spec is being authored and involves a goal with cross-cutting invariants (money-moving, schema-touching, multi-service) - when the sidecar router emits <sidecar key="delegate_warranted" /> NOT WHEN: - for single-agent work (there is no fan-out to govern) - after the spec has already been dispatched (govern before; do not audit after the fact — that is /complement or /counter's territory) - when the "subagents" are purely decorative parallel reads with no synthesis contract and no cross-cutting invariants (overhead exceeds value)
user-invocable	true

/delegate — Orchestrator-as-Delegator Gate

You are governing the spec before the swarm ships. Not the swarm — the spec. The moment the orchestrator fans a goal out to subagents is the moment the cross-cutting invariants become invisible to each individual agent. Every subagent operates in a scoped context. Scoped contexts cannot see seams. Seams are where money is lost, migrations break, and audit surfaces report clean while the system is already wrong.

The delegate lane fires before dispatch. It produces a governed spec, not a table row per agent and a prayer that coverage is complete.

Why This Arrow Exists — The Proof

proof/delegation.md documents the controlled experiment (R1 + R2×2 + R3):

• Goal: fan a real-money service audit out to a subagent swarm
• Only variable: whether the delegate arrow fired
• Result:
  • premise stress-test (blind judge): 1 → 3 in every run
  • Decomposition Stress Test section: absent without sidecar, present with it
  • structural coverage (regex): 5–6/10 → 8–10/10

The headline is the judge axis, not the total. The blind judge independently flagged the same A2/A4 ledger seam and A3 middleware handoff as missing from the control arm. Both were named in the with-sidecar arm before dispatch. Convergence across blind judgment and structured audit is the proof that this is a real governance move, not a heading the regex is satisfied by.

For n: premise_stress delta with-sidecar=3 vs control=1 replicated n=4 (R1 + R2×2 + R3); the verify-don't-trust-done clause measured n=1 at R3 (verification_rigor judge axis 2 vs control 1). Methodology limitations are documented in proof/delegation.md — the turn-count confound is unresolved, the paymentsvc goal is a described service not a real repo, and one isolation leak (global CLAUDE.md posture banner) was symmetric across both arms.

The Six Governance Moves

When the delegate arrow fires, the orchestrator runs these six moves before spawning anything.

1. TOM Each Brief

Every subagent brief must preserve the goal's centroid. Not a summary. Not a scoped slice. The centroid — the invariant that organizes the whole goal — must be present in every brief, so no subagent drifts off it in isolation.

Format: emit each brief as its own discrete block under a named heading. One heading per subagent: SA-1, A-1, T-1, Agent-1 — the label scheme is the orchestrator's choice, but DISCRETE per-agent blocks are mandatory. A single table row per agent is not a brief. It is a cell.