Agent Orchestration

Decompose substantive work into phases, dispatch each phase to a sub-agent, and adjudicate what comes back. Use whenever a request asks for implementation, investigation, a fix, a review, or any change to files — including small ones — and whenever you are about to read source or run a diagnostic yourself instead of handing it off. Also use when a report from a sub-agent needs judging, when a phase needs re-dispatching, or when a user names one instance of a pattern. Does not apply when your own prompt begins "Your ROLE_TYPE is sub-agent." — then follow references/sub-agent-contract.md instead.

Shapes for running many sub-agents at once — fan-out with a barrier, maker/checker, generate-and-filter, tournaments for ranking, hypothesis fan-out for root cause, and loops that stop on a condition with a cap. Use when a phase has several independent targets, when a task is too large or too repetitive for one window, when the same edit applies across many files, when ranking or judging a large set, when several hypotheses compete, or when work must repeat until a signal says stop. Does not apply when units depend on each other's results or the cause is still unknown — investigate first, then parallelize.