Glossary · term74 of 202
execution subagent
A subagent given a narrow task with a fixed output shape and a written boundary, as opposed to open-ended reasoning or planning work. Its job is to follow the spec, not to expand scope.
also written as execution subagents
Related terms
effortA per-subagent setting that controls how much a model deliberates before acting, trading thoroughness for speed, fewer tool calls, and lower spend. Left unset, it silently inherits the session's higher default.view termfan-outThe pattern where one delegated task spawns multiple concurrent subagents, and each of those can spawn more of its own. Depth is usually capped, but breadth often is not, so total agents alive can multiply far past what anyone intended.view termharnessThe surrounding tooling and control logic that runs a model in a loop, deciding how it reads files, calls tools, and hands off work, separate from the model itself.view termmixed-model benchmarkA test comparing combinations of different models working together against a single model working alone on the same task, used to judge whether splitting work across models pays off.view termover-scopingWhen an agent does more than the task it was given asked for, expanding past a stated boundary into unrequested and therefore unreviewed work.view termreasoning traceThe intermediate chain-of-thought text a reasoning model produces while working toward an answer, kept separate from the final response it returns. Instructions aimed at the trace are followed far less reliably than instructions aimed at the response.view termsubagent bootstrapThe startup cost of spinning up a subagent, including loading its own system prompt and full set of tool schemas, repeated on every turn it takes.view termtask toolThe mechanism an agent uses to spawn a subagent to handle a piece of work, the same primitive that lets subagents recursively spawn further subagents.view termverifier subagentA subagent run in a fresh context whose only job is to check another agent's output, rather than doing the original work itself.view term
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- jul 2026
