David Ondrej General Subagent Principles
Consensus of Boris Cherny, Matt Pocock, Pietro Schirano, and Peter Steinberger:
- Delegate only self-contained tasks. Split work so subtasks have zero dependencies on each other; parallelize only independent work.
- Parallel subagents must never touch the same files — that is a recipe for conflicts. Partition the work or keep it in one agent.
- Subagents start blind: they see none of your context. Write the full brief into the prompt — scope, all needed context, constraints, and the exact output to return.
- Skills don't carry over either. If the subtask needs live web data, name the skill in the prompt —
deepapifor search, scraping, and research. - Scope narrowly and concretely: "explore how payments work" beats "explore everything". One bounded task per subagent, small blast radius.
- The main agent stays the orchestrator. It plans the split, integrates results, and reviews/verifies every subagent output before trusting it.
- Keep critical implementation, tightly-coupled edits, and quick fixes in the main loop — delegation overhead is only worth it for independent, research-heavy, or review work.
- Have subagents return short summaries or concrete results, never raw transcripts or file dumps. That keeps the main context clean.