/orchestrate-agent-work

name: orchestrate-agent-work
description: Coordinate bounded worker tasks with a launch envelope, report-back, escalation, and synthesis contract. Use before spawning, resuming, steering, cancelling, or closing subagents.

Orchestrate Agent Work

Use this skill at the delegation boundary. The coordinator owns the user goal, decomposition, authority, final decision, validation, and closure; workers own only their assigned slice.

Workflow

1. Confirm delegation is requested or required by the active workflow. Prefer a single agent when the work is sequential or one small write target. 2. Split only independent work. Assign one coordinator and one owner per artifact, worktree, branch, validation lane, and external side effect. 3. Give every worker a launch envelope:

• task and coordinator identity;
• objective, bounded scope, inputs, and source-of-truth locations;
• allowed and forbidden actions, including write authority;
• acceptance criteria, validation owner, and output location;
• required terminal report and escalation conditions.

4. State whether the coordinator waits for all results, consumes partial reports, or hands work to a durable task surface. 5. Track each worker until it is `completed`, `blocked`, `needs-decision`, `cancelled`, or `failed`. A worker must not silently stop. 6. Acknowledge each result: consume it, request one bounded follow-up, mark it superseded, or cancel it explicitly. Then synthesize and verify the result in the coordinator thread.

Worker Report Contract

Require the final report to contain the terminal state, outcome, evidence or artifacts, validation run or intentionally skipped, uncertainty, and one recommended next action. Workers escalate rather than improvise when scope, authority, ownership, evidence, or acceptance criteria change.

Boundaries

• Keep user-facing decisions, final edits, merge, release, and final validation

with the coordinator unless a user-approved disjoint ownership plan says otherwise.

• Default to one delegation layer. Nested orchestration needs an explicit

reason, bounded fan-out/depth, and host support.

• Use `coordinate-external-agents` when work crosses a host, session, or

durable ownership boundary.

• Use `coordinate-worktrees-and-threads` when workers need repository state.

When the selected host is Codex and the worktree mode, local environment, or app-owned thread association needs a decision, compose it with `repository-skills:codex-gui-worktree-workflow`. On Hermes or another host, keep the ownership contract host-neutral and use ordinary Git worktrees.