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Multi-agent (the task tool)

The model can call task({ description, prompt }) to spin up a fresh sub-agent with its own tool registry and its own conversation. The sub-agent runs to completion and reports a summary back - only that summary re-enters the parent’s context, not the sub-agent’s full transcript.

This is useful for work that would otherwise bloat the main context: “search the codebase for every place X is configured and summarize”, “read these five files and tell me which one has the bug”.

Bounds

Section titled “Bounds”
  • Depth limit - sub-agents can themselves call task, up to a hard depth of 3 by default. At the limit, the task tool simply isn’t offered to that sub-agent, so recursion can’t run away.
  • Concurrency - multiple task calls emitted in a single model turn run concurrently.
  • Permissions - sub-agents share the parent’s permission gate; a sub-agent can’t do anything the parent couldn’t.
  • Persistence - sub-agent conversations are in-memory only; they’re never written to ~/.polyglot/sessions/.