# Dispatch Economics

> Cost and quality discipline for dispatching sub-agents, background workers, or multi-agent workflows. Use before launching any agent fleet or long-running autonomous task, and whenever someone mentions burning through quota or budget.

- Skill: `lightarktech/dispatch-economics` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add lightarktech/dispatch-economics`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/lightarktech/dispatch-economics/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: AI & ML
- Author: lightarktech (https://skillmd.com/u/lightarktech)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/lightarktech/dispatch-economics

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Quality first, tokens second — and they align. A single agent grinding for hundreds of turns doesn't just cost more; it gets *worse* (context rot: by turn 200 it re-reads a bloated history every turn and reasons over noise). Small, fresh-context units are both cheaper and smarter.

We learned this on a real bill: three days of undisciplined dispatch, one week's entire quota gone to cached-context churn. The autopsy is in [case-studies/token-burn-postmortem.md](../../case-studies/token-burn-postmortem.md).

## Rules

- **One agent per ticket by default.** A fleet needs all three preconditions:
  1. **Quote first** — say out loud, before launch: how many agents, which model tier each one runs on, how long, estimated tokens.
  2. **Per-agent contract** — ≤100 turns, ≤5 tasks; hit a cap → save progress to disk, report, split into a fresh agent.
  3. **True parallelism only** — fan out only work items with no dependencies on each other.
- **Every quote names a tier per agent.** Tier sits beside agent count, duration and budget percentage — same line, not a footnote, never "we'll decide as we go". Two reasons, both load-bearing. The founder is the one paying for this compute: a quote without tiers asks him to approve a blind box. And having to write the tier down forces you to re-read your own staffing before launch — "cheapest tier" sitting next to "verify the payment logic" is a mistake you catch when you have to say it out loud. Which tier to pick: `model-tiering`.
- **Verification force ≤ 1/3 of build force.** Reviewer armies grow quadratically if you let them (N findings × M verifiers). Cap adversarial review at 2 rounds — converged means stop; there is no "one more round for safety".
- **Slice work vertically.** A ticket = one thin end-to-end feature (schema + logic + UI + test) that fits in a single fresh context window. Never slice by technical layer — layer-slices create the 300-turn monster agents.
- **The expensive session never digs.** Your main (priciest) session dispatches a scout to read files or the web and consumes its conclusion. Thinking at the top, grinding at the bottom — but note that scouting an unfamiliar codebase is thinking, not grinding, and is staffed accordingly: `model-tiering`.
- **A hot usage line is a diagnosis, not an order to downgrade.** Chase the cause, warn the person paying when a line crosses the high-water mark you picked, and keep planning and final judgment at full strength: `model-tiering`.
- **Restarts resume, never re-run.** Crashed work restarts from its saved artifacts. Re-running from scratch doubles the bill for zero new value.

## Success criteria

Every dispatch was quoted before launch, tier named per agent. No agent exceeded its contract. The bill correlates with shipped output — and the top line item is thinking, not grinding.