openhuman/gitbooks/features/native-tools/agent-coordination.md

description, icon

description	icon
Tools the agent uses to plan, delegate, and ask for help.	sitemap

Agent Coordination

Beyond doing the work, the agent has tools for organising the work - planning multi-step jobs, delegating to specialists, spawning subagents, and pausing to ask the user when something is genuinely ambiguous.

Tools in the family

Tool	What it does
todo_write	Maintain a structured TODO list across a long task. Marked done as work progresses.
spawn_subagent	Spin up a fresh agent with its own context window for a self-contained subtask.
spawn_worker_thread	Background work that doesn't need to block the main conversation.
delegate	Hand a task to a specialist (e.g. an archetype with different prompts/tools/permissions).
archetype_delegation	Route to a named archetype - coder, researcher, planner, etc.
skill_delegation	Hand off to a skill installed in the workspace.
ask_clarification	Pause and ask the user a precise question instead of guessing.
plan_exit	Exit a planning phase and start executing.
check_onboarding_status / complete_onboarding	Gate behaviour on whether the user has finished onboarding.

spawn_subagent and archetype delegation calls accept an optional model field for a one-off exact model pin. If it is omitted, the harness uses config-level per-agent pins when present and otherwise falls back to the normal model-routing hints.

Why these are tools, not implicit behaviour

Long tasks fall apart when the agent tries to keep everything in one head. Splitting work via TODOs and subagents means:

• Each subagent gets a clean context - fewer tokens, fewer distractions.
• The main thread keeps a high-level view of progress.
• Failures in one branch don't poison the rest.

Asking for clarification is a tool too, on purpose: it makes "I should ask the user" a visible decision the agent can be steered toward, not an emergent behaviour.

See also

• Coder - what a coder-archetype subagent typically uses.
• Subconscious Loop - the always-on background agent thread.