Dispatching Parallel Agents

Purpose

Use parallel children for two or more ad-hoc, bounded tasks only when their independence is already credible and concurrency is worth the coordination. Parallelism changes elapsed time; it does not relax evidence, ownership, or completion requirements.

Dispatch Gate

Dispatch only when all are true:

• there are 2+ distinct tasks or evidence questions;
• one task's result is not needed to define or start another;
• the tasks do not require overlapping writes or the same mutable resource;
• a shared root cause is unlikely based on current evidence;
• each result can be returned with bounded evidence and unresolved unknowns;
• available concurrency and expected work justify coordination cost.

Keep work inline when decomposition is still exploratory, failures may share a root cause, full-system context is required, or tasks are too small to repay the handoff. A written implementation plan routes to aegis:subagent-driven-development, not this ad-hoc workflow.

Context And Ownership

Choose the live host's context inheritance mode deliberately. Give each child the minimum sufficient instructions and evidence; do not rely on accidental inheritance or assume that context must never be inherited.

Each task packet states:

• goal and question to resolve;
• allowed files, systems, and side effects;
• known facts and evidence locations;
• constraints, non-goals, and stop condition;
• expected result shape, including unknowns and verification refs.

Isolated model context does not imply an isolated filesystem, process, Git repository, credential, rate limit, or external service. Prefer read-only investigation. If children may edit, assign disjoint write ownership explicitly. The coordinator owns staging, commits, branches, worktrees, integration, and other Git lifecycle mutations.

Execution