Glossary · term185 of 202
task tool
The mechanism an agent uses to spawn a subagent to handle a piece of work, the same primitive that lets subagents recursively spawn further subagents.
also written as task tool call
Related terms
execution subagentA 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.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 termno-op turnA turn where a parent agent produces no new work because it is only waiting on background subagents to finish, yet still consumes a turn of the conversation.view termorphaned agentA spawned subagent whose parent task record is gone, so it keeps running and consuming resources while showing as untrackable and unable to be stopped.view termtasks primitiveA poll-based mechanism in MCP for durable work, letting a client fetch results after a dropped connection instead of resuming a live stream. It replaced resumable SSE streams as the way to survive a failure.view term
At a glance
- cited by
- 1 post
- categories
- 1
- first used
- jul 2026
