dispatching-parallel-agents

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# Dispatching Parallel Agents

## Overview

You delegate tasks to specialized agents with isolated context. By precisely crafting their instructions and context, you ensure they stay focused and succeed at their task. They should never inherit your session's context or history — you construct exactly what they need. This also preserves your own context for coordination work.

When you have multiple unrelated failures (different test files, different subsystems, different bugs), investigating them sequentially wastes time. Each investigation is independent and can happen in parallel.

**Core principle:** Dispatch one agent per independent problem domain. Let them work concurrently.

**Nesting and scale:** Subagents can spawn their own subagents up to 5 levels deep, so a dispatched agent owning a large domain can fan out helpers for its sub-steps rather than doing everything serially. When the work-list is large, repetitive, or unknown in size (every route, every package in a monorepo, every finding to verify), stop hand-dispatching and escalate to a **dynamic Workflow** — describe the task and include the word "workflow" so an orchestration script pipelines the items across background subagents with a verification stage built in. Rule of thumb: a few independent tasks → dispatch agents here; dozens of items or fan-out-then-verify → a Workflow.

## When to Use

```dot
digraph when_to_use {
    "Multiple failures?" [shape=diamond];
    "Are they independent?" [shape=diamond];
    "Single agent investigates all" [shape=box];
    "One agent per problem domain" [shape=box];
    "Can they work in parallel?" [shape=diamond];
    "Sequential agents" [shape=box];
    "Parallel dispatch" [shape=box];

    "Multiple failures?" -> "Are they independent?" [label="yes"];
    "Are they independent?" -> "Single agent investigates all" [label="no - related"];
    "Are they independent?" -> "Can they work in parallel?" [label="yes"];
    "Can they work in parallel?" -> "Parallel dispatch" [label="yes"];
    "Can they work in parallel?" -> "Sequential agents" [label="no - shared state"];
}
```

**Use when:**
- 3+ test files failing with different root causes
- Multiple subsystems broken independently
- Each problem can be understood without context from others
- No shared state between investigations

**Don't use when:**
- Failures are related (fix one might fix others)
- Need to understand full system state
- Agents would interfere with each other

## The Pattern

### 1. Identify Independent Domains

Group failures by what's broken:
- File A tests: Tool approval flow
- File B tests: Batch completion behavior
- File C tests: Abort functionality

Each domain is independent - fixing tool approval doesn't affect abort tests.

### 2. Create Focused Agent Tasks

Each agent gets:
- **Specific scope:** One test file or subsystem
- **Clear goal:** Make these tests pass
- **Constraints:** Don't change other code
- **Expected output:** Summary of what you found and fixed

### 3. Dispatch in Parallel

```typescript
// In Claude Code / AI environment
Task("Fix agent-tool-abort.test.ts failures")
Task("Fix batch-completion-behavior.test.ts failures")
Task("Fix tool-approval-race-conditions.test.ts failures")
// All three run concurrently
```

### 4. Review and Integrate

When agents return:
- Read each summary
- Verify fixes don't conflict
- Run full test suite
- Integrate all changes

## Agent Prompt Structure

Good agent prompts are:
1. **Focused** - One clear problem domain
2. **Self-contained** - All context the agent needs, INCLUDING relevant code snippets
3. **Specific about output** - What should the agent return?
4. **Permission to explore** - Agent can read files it needs, not just files you anticipated

**The #1 reason subagents fail is context starvation.** The controller thinks it provided enough context but didn't. When in doubt, include more:
- Paste the actual error messages, not paraphrases
- Paste relevant code snippets inline (don't make the agent find them)
- Name the exact files and line numbers involved
- Describe the patterns/conventions the codebase uses
- Tell the agent what adjacent files exist and what they do

```markdown
Fix the 3 failing tests in src/agents/agent-tool-abort.test.ts:

1. "should abort tool with partial output capture" - expects 'interrupted at' in message
2. "should handle mixed completed and aborted tools" - fast tool aborted instead of completed
3. "should properly track pendingToolCount" - expects 3 results but gets 0

These are timing/race condition issues. The abort implementation is in
src/agents/agent-tool-handler.ts (the abortTool method around line 150).
Tests use a helper createMockToolStream() from test-utils.ts.

Your task:

1. Read the test file and the implementation file
2. Identify root cause - timing issues or actual bugs?
3. Fix by:
   - Replacing arbitrary timeouts with event-based waiting
   - Fixing bugs in abort implementation if found
   - Adjusting test expectations if testing changed behavior
4. You may read other files if needed to understand the system

Do NOT just increase timeouts - find the real issue.

Return: Summary of what you found and what you fixed.

From anderson-0/mighty-powers, MIT.

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