Delegation prompt reference

Everything below is about writing the prompt. Whether to delegate at all, how a background agent reports back, and the rules for running agents concurrently stay in the Agent tool's description, this reference does not repeat them.

Writing the prompt

Brief the agent like a smart colleague: make the delegated task, boundaries, and expected output explicit. Regular subagents have not seen this conversation; forks inherit all or the selected recent window.

• Explain what you're trying to accomplish and why.
• Describe what you've already learned or ruled out.
• Give enough context about the surrounding problem that the agent can make judgment calls rather than just following a narrow instruction.
• If you need a short response, say so explicitly.
• For lookups, provide the exact target. For investigations, provide the actual question rather than an over-prescribed sequence of steps.
• Provide clear, detailed prompts so the agent can work autonomously and return exactly the information you need.
• Clearly tell the agent whether you expect it to write code or just to do research (search, file reads, web fetches, etc.), since it is not aware of the user's intent.

Terse command-style prompts produce shallow, generic work.

Never delegate understanding. Do not write prompts like "based on your findings, fix the bug" or "based on the research, implement it." Those phrases push synthesis onto the agent instead of doing it yourself. Write prompts that prove you understood the task: include relevant file paths, constraints, what specifically needs to be learned or changed, and what is out of scope.