Apartment38/Agent-Skills

Parallel Agent Delegation

Use when fanning work out to several subagents in one delegate_task call, especially when they create or edit files. Most cost overruns and corrupted trees here come from two agents believing they own the same file.

When to Use

Any multi-agent fan-out where the tasks touch the same repository, directory, or project — file creation, refactors split by area, or build-then-test splits.

Procedure

1. Slice before dispatching, by path. Give every task exclusive ownership of named files or directories. Two agents may not write the same file, and no file may be left unassigned. Prefer fewer, clearly larger slices over many overlapping ones.

2. State absolute paths in every task brief. Relative paths resolve against a different working directory inside some agents, which is how work lands in ~/fixture instead of ~/Projects/app/fixture. Include an explicit "create nothing outside this tree" line.

3. Assign one owner per shared file. Config files, manifests and list registries get claimed by a single task by name; tell the others they must not edit it, only report what it should contain.

4. Forbid side effects you do not want. Say explicitly whether installs, builds, test runs and git commits are allowed. Unsupervised installs scatter node_modules into unrelated directories.

5. Ask for a machine-checkable report: exact absolute paths created, what was verified, and how it was verified (parsed, rendered, built, unit-tested). Self-reported success without a verification method is noise.

6. Verify the merged result yourself before committing or reporting: build, run the test suite, and read critical files back. Do not trust that N independent reports compose into a working tree.

7. Sweep for strays. Search outside the target tree for directories the agents may have created (home root, sibling project dirs, scratch). Reconcile anything found before the session ends.

Always-on rules

• Deleted files are a symptom: when two agents prune "unused" paths, each removes what the other just wrote. Assign deletion rights explicitly.
• Do not block your own turn waiting on sibling agents; continue independent work and act when their results arrive.
• When results land after you have already finished and committed, check working-tree state and stray files, then decide what still needs doing — do not assume the tree is clean, and do not assume their work conflicts.
• Keep the number of agents writing to one artifact as low as possible; fan out across read-only analysis freely, across writes sparingly.

Pitfalls

• Shared-name collisions. Two briefs describing "the CSS files" or "the config" route to different paths per agent; name exact absolute paths.
• Convention drift. Agents seeing a partially built tree adopt another's layout mid-flight, leaving two conventions in one project; lock the layout in the brief.
• Trusting unrun verification. Reports claiming a build or render passed without evidence usually mean it was judged structurally; reproduce it.
• Cleanup collisions. One agent deleting its own "now-dead" files can delete a sibling's deliverable — see always-on rule above.

Supporting files

• templates/delegation-brief.md — copy-and-fill task brief enforcing path ownership, forbidden side effects, and a verifiable report format.