Delegation
When one agent hands a piece of work to another agent better suited to do it.
Think of it like
A GP referring you to a specialist instead of trying to do the surgery themselves.
Example
The main agent hits a math-heavy step, so it delegates that part to a dedicated calculation agent and waits for the answer.
How it actually works
Delegation lets you compose specialists instead of building one agent that does everything mediocrely. It introduces the same overhead any org has — briefing the other party, trusting their result, reconciling it back. The failure mode is a game of telephone where context gets lost at each handoff, so good delegation is careful about what information travels with the task.
For product teams
Delegation lets you assemble focused agents into a capable whole, at the cost of coordination overhead.
For engineers
One agent invokes another as a sub-call, passing a scoped task and integrating its returned result.
Related
- Manager-Worker — A common shape delegation takes.
- Handoff — Passing control to another agent.
- Task Decomposition — Breaking work up so it can be handed off.
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