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Use when you have a task and must decide WHO does it — yourself, a spawned subagent, or another agent in the topology that already holds the context. The rule: how much would a blank slate have to rea
The skill file stays in the publisher's repository.
Paste the copied command in a terminal. It installs this SKILL.md into that agent.
npx skills add mvschwarz/openrig --skill delegating-work -a cursor -y
Use when you have a task and must decide WHO does it — yourself, a spawned subagent, or another agent in the topology that already holds the context. The rule: how much would a blank slate have to read in to do this correctly? A lot → route to a context-holding agent; a little → subagent; unsure → a real agent or yourself. NOT the mechanics of fanning out (that's dispatching-parallel-agents / subagent-driven-development) — this is the who/whether decision, and the failure mode that makes teams abandon subagents.
Use when you have a task and must decide WHO does it — yourself, a spawned subagent, or another agent in the topology that already holds the context. The rule: how much would a blank slate have to read in to do this correctly? A lot → route to a context-holding agent; a little → subagent; unsure → a real agent or yourself. NOT the mechanics of fanning out (that's dispatching-parallel-agents / subagent-driven-development) — this is the who/whether decision, and the failure mode that makes teams abandon subagents.
Getting work done well is a context problem. The agent best suited to a task is the one who already holds the context that task requires. Before you spawn a subagent or grind it out yourself, ask who that is.
Ask: how much would a blank slate have to read in before it could do this correctly?
For self-contained work that is fully specifiable in the prompt, spawn a subagent instead of spending your own context: tracing, research, grounding passes, summarizing, scanning log files, searching, fetching, web search, mechanical extraction with citations. This is the common shape and it is under-used.
Subagents start as blank slates, and you cannot anticipate everything they need to know. Give one a task where there is a lot to understand and it will have blind spots it does not know it has — it will complete the task and return a false conclusion, not from weakness but because it lacked the context to know what "correct" even looked like.
This is the unknown-unknowns problem, and it is the single most common subagent failure: a poorly-contextualized summary is worse than no summary, because it arrives looking like an answer. Overreliance on subagents for context-heavy work causes more problems than it solves — and a team burned by it stops using subagents at all, which is the wrong correction. The fix is not "avoid subagents"; it is "match the task to the context it needs."
Before delegating to a blank slate, ask: would a wrong-but-plausible answer here be detectable? If the requester cannot check the result against something they already know — a citation they can open, a count they can re-run — the blind-spot risk is unacceptable, and that task belongs with an agent that holds the context.
file:line citations and an explicit instruction to report facts, not recommendations. Self-contained; the requester can verify the citations.This is really "route work to whoever holds the context," with subagents as the option for work that needs none. The audience is every agent — implementers and QA seats make this call as much as orchestrators do.
Whoever does the work, give them the goal, why it matters, the context you hold and where to find more, then let them decide how. When you have the requester's own words, pass them on instead of compressing them into a list of steps. A capable agent with the goal builds better than one painting inside a narrow spec, which gets exactly what was written and not what was wanted. Keep exact instructions for the few things that must be exact, and say why.
dispatching-parallel-agents (the fan-out mechanics).subagent-driven-development.directing-partner-agents.human-in-the-loop.