majiayu000 Parallel agent delivery
Parallelism is a property of the work, not a preference. Establish it before dispatching.
When it is safe
All three must hold:
- Disjoint write surfaces — no two agents touch the same file. Not "unlikely to conflict"; provably disjoint.
- No sequential dependency — none needs another's output to start.
- Independently verifiable — each result can be judged on its own.
Fail any one and run sequentially. Two agents editing one file produces a merge conflict at best and a silent lost update at worst.
Dispatching
Each agent gets a self-contained brief: the goal, its exclusive surface, the context it cannot see for itself, and the shape of the answer expected. Agents share no memory — anything you leave out is gone.
Ask for a structured return, the same shape from each, so results can be compared rather than re-read.
Read-only fan-out is the easy case
Searching, auditing, and reviewing have no write surface at all, so they parallelize without risk. Reach for parallelism here first and freely.
Integrating
- Review each result against its brief before merging any of them.
- Where two disagree on a shared fact, neither is authoritative — resolve it yourself.
- One agent returning nothing useful is a normal outcome, not a failure to retry blindly.
Never
- Split work to look faster when the steps are actually sequential.
- Let two agents write to one surface because "they probably won't collide."
- Merge a result you have not read.