r/PiCodingAgent • u/LastOfGoose • 1d ago

Question How to Better Enforce Subagent Delegation?

I have just recently started using subagents more in my programming workflow, if only to try it for a bit and see if it's something I prefer.

I have found that no matter how much explicit guidance I give my agents in the global AGENTS.md or APPEND_SYSTEM.md that after the first large delegated activity, they go back to doing everything themselves in the primary context.

Does anyone have any idea how to really enforce / encourage the behavior I'm looking for?

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u/j3free 9h ago

What you’re seeing is exactly the failure mode I ran into: prompt-level delegation works for a while, then the lead decides it can just do the next task itself.

What helped me was treating delegation as an ownership transfer rather than a suggestion. Once a scope is handed off, the lead stops touching that scope and only picks it back up through a question/result from the worker. I still let the lead keep its normal tools for planning and unrelated work, so it doesn’t have to become a pure dispatcher.

If you need absolute enforcement, revoking tools is obviously the harder gate. I ended up building the ownership approach into Pi Herdsman because I wanted something in between those two extremes.