Hermes Ephemeral Delegation

Activation Contract

Load this skill when you are acting as the parent orchestrator and the work ahead has a named reason to delegate:

• A map you need to decide or route that exceeds the inline evidence budget (codebase mapping, approach comparison); never to read files you will read anyway before writing inline
• A writer reason: 2+ independent units of behavior (code, tests, and docs together; each several minutes of work) launched together, or the context backstop; a large task alone is tracked, not delegated
• A high-risk change that needs an independent verifier, or a large task's long suites and builds
• Fresh adversarial review (diffs, PR readiness, incident audit); never restart it automatically for a candidate whose terminal approved authority was already burned and that is unchanged since, unless a new independent review is deliberately requested
• Multi-step debugging that would flood the parent context

Do NOT load this skill if you are already inside a delegated child task, you are the executor, not the orchestrator.

Hard Rules

• Use delegate_task only for a named reason listed above. Without one, work inline following your logbook; file count, size, or a large task alone is never a reason.
• Workers are EPHEMERAL: each delegate_task call creates a fresh context. Do NOT request persistent agent files or profiles.
• Pass a self-contained mission. Workers have no memory of the parent conversation.
• Treat worker output as self-report: verify file writes, test pass/fail, URLs, and IDs before reporting success to the user.
• Batch parallel calls only for INDEPENDENT workstreams. Sequential dependencies must run sequentially.

Decision Gates