Sub-agents & Delegation

For complex tasks with multiple independent parts, the Astonish agent can delegate work to sub-agents that run in parallel. This speeds up multi-step workflows significantly.

How delegation works

The delegate_tasks tool spawns up to 10 sub-agents simultaneously. Each sub-agent receives:

• Its own isolated session — linked to the parent session for traceability
• Read-only access to memory — sub-agents can reference stored knowledge but do not write to it
• Filtered tool access — only the tools needed for the specific sub-task
• A timeout — 5 minutes by default, configurable

The agent decides autonomously when to delegate. Typically this happens when a task has 3 or more independent parts that each require multiple tool calls.

Sub-agent results are collected and synthesized by the parent agent into a unified response.

The OpenCode sub-agent

The opencode tool is a specialized coding sub-agent designed for complex software engineering tasks. The parent agent can delegate implementation, refactoring, or debugging work to it.

Viewing sub-agent work

To see sub-agent traces inlined with the parent session:

astonish sessions show <id> --recursive

Each sub-agent session is also accessible individually through the standard astonish sessions show command.

Configuration

These settings can be adjusted through Studio Settings > Sub-agents, or in config.yaml:

sub_agents:
  enabled: true              # enable/disable delegation (default: true)
  max_depth: 2               # maximum nesting depth (default: 2)
  max_concurrent: 5          # max parallel sub-agents (default: 5)
  task_timeout_sec: 300      # per-task timeout in seconds (default: 300)