clawdbot/docs/subagents.md

summary, read_when

summary	read_when
Sub-agents: spawning isolated agent runs that announce results back to the requester chat	You want background/parallel work via the agent You are changing sessions_spawn or sub-agent tool policy

Sub-agents

Sub-agents are background agent runs spawned from an existing agent run. They run in their own session (subagent:<uuid>) and, when finished, announce their result back to the requester chat surface.

Primary goals:

• Parallelize “research / long task / slow tool” work without blocking the main run.
• Keep sub-agents isolated by default (session separation + optional sandboxing).
• Keep the tool surface hard to misuse: sub-agents do not get session tools by default.
• Avoid nested fan-out: sub-agents cannot spawn sub-agents.

Tool

Use sessions_spawn:

• Starts a sub-agent run (deliver: false, global lane: subagent)
• Then runs an announce step and posts the announce reply to the requester chat surface

Tool params:

• task (required)
• label? (optional)
• timeoutSeconds? (default 0; 0 = fire-and-forget)
• cleanup? (delete|keep, default delete)

Announce

Sub-agents report back via an announce step:

• The announce step runs inside the sub-agent session (not the requester session).
• If the sub-agent replies exactly ANNOUNCE_SKIP, nothing is posted.
• Otherwise the announce reply is posted to the requester chat surface via the gateway send method.

Tool Policy (sub-agent tools)

By default, sub-agents get all tools except session tools:

• sessions_list
• sessions_history
• sessions_send
• sessions_spawn

Override via config:

{
  agent: {
    subagents: {
      maxConcurrent: 1,
      tools: {
        // deny wins
        deny: ["gateway", "cron"],
        // if allow is set, it becomes allow-only (deny still wins)
        // allow: ["read", "bash", "process"]
      }
    }
  }
}

Concurrency

Sub-agents use a dedicated in-process queue lane:

• Lane name: subagent
• Concurrency: agent.subagents.maxConcurrent (default 1)

Limitations

• Sub-agent announce is best-effort. If the gateway restarts, pending “announce back” work is lost.
• Sub-agents still share the same gateway process resources; treat maxConcurrent as a safety valve.