subagent

name

subagent

description

The ONLY sanctioned way to delegate work to a lazar sub-agent. Uses locked bin/lazar-spawn — lints the prompt, bounds retries, wall-clock-kills wedged children, and gates success by re-checking declared claims against the filesystem. Prefer pack-and-spawn.sh to write a BRIEF context pack then dispatch. Raw `lazar -p` is vetoed by a pre-tool hook. Use for isolated file-verifiable tasks and parallel fan-out — not for routine bash.

subagent — how I extend myself

Delegation is a core skill. I never call lazar -p directly (a pre-tool hook vetoes it). I go through the locked spawn surface, preferably with a context pack:

# Recommended: BRIEF.md + thin prompt + lazar-spawn
bash "$LAZAR_HOME/skills/_meta/subagent/pack-and-spawn.sh" <task-id> \
  --objective "..." \
  --out /absolute/deliverable \
  --path /absolute/input \
  --skill create-skill \
  --note "user wants terse output"

# Lower-level (already-written prompt file):
bash "$LAZAR_HOME/bin/lazar-spawn" <task-id> <prompt-file>

bin/lazar-spawn is installed by setup.sh with the same immutability story as bin/lazar. Budget state lives in logs/subagent/. The copy under skills/_meta/subagent/spawn.sh is only a re-exec stub.

When to spawn vs do it yourself

Do it yourself (bash in-process)	Spawn a child
< ~3 tool steps	Isolated unit with a file deliverable
Needs live conversational deixis	Context isolation would help the parent
Exploratory one-off	2+ independent units (parallel via agent-dispatch)
Result is just stdout to reason on	SUCCESS can be checked on disk

Never wrap every bash call as a subagent — latency and token cost explode.

Context pack (enough context without cloning chat)

Children are strangers with a filesystem. Do not dump parent history. Write workspace/tasks/<id>/BRIEF.md (pack-and-spawn does this) containing:

1. Imperative objective
2. Absolute input/output paths
3. SUCCESS: + EXPECT-VERIFY: claims you author
4. Relevant skill names (not full INDEX)
5. ≤ ~20 lines of prior decisions / constraints
6. Out-of-scope list
7. RESULT.md protocol (DONE / BLOCKED)

The spawn -p string stays thin and points at the BRIEF.

Gate on the envelope

lazar-spawn re-checks EXPECT-VERIFY and returns {"status":"ok","matched":true} only if claims hold. Trust matched, not child prose. On matched:false, fix the BRIEF and retry within ceilings.

Bounds (all models)

1. Kernel stall-nudges (in-child recovery, bounded)
2. Per-task ceiling LAZAR_SPAWN_CEILING (default 2)
3. Session budget LAZAR_SPAWN_BUDGET (default 10)
4. Wall-clock LAZAR_SPAWN_TIMEOUT (default 300s)
5. Recursion depth cap (kernel MAX_DEPTH)

Self-test

bash skills/_meta/subagent/selftest.sh

Async (optional)

bash "$LAZAR_HOME/bin/lazar-spawn" --detach <task-id> <prompt-file>
# → {"status":"running","job_id":"..."}

bash "$LAZAR_HOME/bin/lazar-spawn" --status <job-id>
bash "$LAZAR_HOME/bin/lazar-spawn" --await <job-id>

Prefer sync spawn for single tasks. Use --detach only for parallel fan-out; still gate on matched via --await/--status.