| name | delegate-bulk |
| description | This skill should be used when deciding whether to hand volumetric or noisy work to an isolated subagent (or another harness) instead of doing it in the main context — e.g. reading many files, digesting long logs/docs, wide searches, or bulk mechanical generation. It gives the rule for when isolation saves tokens versus when it just multiplies them. Part of the HarnessTrim token-economy stack. |
| version | 0.1.0 |
| license | MIT |
delegate-bulk
Subagents are not free parallelism — each carries its own context and bills its own tokens. The
right move is surgical isolation of noise, not "multi-agent everything."
Delegate to an isolated subagent when
- A task will read a large volume the main thread doesn't need to retain — many files, long
logs, big docs, wide search results — and you only need the conclusion back, not the raw bytes.
- The work is noisy but self-contained: exploring a subsystem, triaging a failing test suite,
digesting API docs. Isolate it so its raw output never pollutes the main context.
- You need several independent investigations at once and each one's detail is irrelevant to the
others.
The token win comes from the subagent returning a short structured answer while its expensive
reading stays in a context you throw away.
Do NOT delegate when
- The task is small enough that spawning a context costs more than it saves.
- The main thread needs the full detail anyway (delegating then re-reading is pure overhead).
- You'd spawn many agents that each re-load the same large context — that multiplies tokens, the
opposite of the goal.
Cross-harness delegation
The same logic extends across harnesses: route bulk scaffolding/boilerplate to a cheaper or
execution-oriented channel and keep architecture, review, and validation on the main one. Suppress
the delegated channel's verbose thinking/output from re-entering the main context. Pair with
[[scaffold-fast]] for the delegated bulk work and [[compact-handoff]] for what the subagent returns.
Rule of thumb
Delegate to shrink what the main context must hold, never to duplicate it.
