Skip to main content

Delegation and sub-agents

Carina can delegate work to sub-agents for isolated tool use, parallel research, or specialist personas.

flowchart LR
  Parent[Parent session] --> Del[Delegate tool]
  Del --> Sub[Sub-agent session]
  Sub --> Tools[Tool subset]
  Sub --> Report[Summary back to parent]
  Report --> Parent

When to delegate​

  • Long-running research with many tool calls
  • Risk isolation (sub-agent has narrower tool allowlist)
  • Cron and scheduled tasks spawning one-shot agents

Sub-agent lifecycle​

  1. Parent issues delegate instruction with goal and constraints
  2. Sub-agent runs in its own session id with capped turns
  3. Result is summarized back to the parent session (not full raw logs by default)

Configuration​

  • Tool allowlists via workspace toolsets and Scout policy
  • Timeouts and max turns in orchestrator config

Source references​

  • agents/subagent-*.ts
  • agents/orchestrator.ts
  • Cron / taskflow spawn paths under agents/ and taskflow/