krow-workforce-agent has declared five subagents since it was written and
answered every question by itself. Everything for §6 existed except the
delegation: the parser read `subagents:`, runtime.Agent carried them, the
loader populated them, agent_runs had a parent_run_id column with a
self-reference and a no-self-parent constraint, and budget.go's comments
already described sharing a budget with subagents. Nothing called any of it.
A subagent is offered to the parent's model as a tool, because §6 says that is
what delegation is from the parent's side. Three rules are enforced rather than
assumed, each with a test that fails if it stops holding:
I1 The subagent runs as the ORIGINAL caller. It cannot read anything the
person could not read directly.
§6 It SHARES the parent's budget. The test sets MaxSteps to 1, spends it in
the parent, and asserts the child terminates BudgetExceeded — an
assertion that only passes when the budget is shared, and that a fresh
budget would quietly turn green.
§3 Depth is capped at 2. At the cap no subagent is loaded or offered, so a
cycle reaching run time is bounded rather than unbounded.
I4 survives too: a write a SUBAGENT wants approved still stops the whole run
and asks a person, rather than being performed because it happened one level
down.
Two bugs found by running it rather than by reading it:
- delegate() read the error before the result. finish returns a non-nil
error for every termination that is not Completed, INCLUDING
ConfirmationPending — which is not a failure but a run that stopped to ask
a question. Reading the error first discarded the result and with it the
confirmation, so a subagent's write silently never happened and nobody was
asked.
- Delegated trajectories were never persisted at all. parent_run_id is a
foreign key and a subagent finishes BEFORE the run that delegated to it,
so every child insert named a parent row that did not exist yet. The
database refused it; finish deliberately does not fail a run over a sink
error; and the entry recording that the trajectory could not be saved was
itself in the trajectory that was not saved. Children are now buffered and
written by finish after the parent's own row, each arriving with its
descendants already ordered behind it, so one pass writes a whole tree
parent-first. The regression test asserts on save ORDER, because a
MemorySink has no foreign key and will pass either way.
Verified end to end against a live model: an agent with no tools of its own and
one subagent produced
delegation-probe run=run_16622d7de6 parent=(root)
talent-pool-agent run=run_64160684b1 parent=run_16622d7de6
with the subagent's answer reaching the parent's model. Full suite green, only
TestLive* skipped.
Not addressed: §3's publish-time cycle detection, which needs the whole agent
set in hand. The depth cap is what holds without it, and is the half that
matters at run time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PJvibeSc1JYXjatankqM1g
