agent/skill-delegate

A native aux4 agent skill that gives an agent a methodology for delegating work — running it in the background, in parallel, on a schedule, or handing it to another agent — instead of forcing everything into a single turn. It teaches the agent when to offload versus do work directly, and how to dispatch, monitor, react, self-delegate, parallelize, and clean up.

It is an instruction skill: prompt-only, no domain commands, no run, and no LLM dependency. It does not wrap aux4 jobs. The consuming agent already has aux4 jobs, aux4 cron, aux4 poll, and aux4 queue/channel, plus the LLM to reason — this skill supplies the discipline the agent applies with its own calls. It depends on aux4/ai-skill only (for the shared ai:skill profile and the skill contract).

Installation

aux4 aux4 pkger install agent/skill-delegate

Quick Start

aux4 ai skill delegate prompt

This prints the methodology. The agent reads it, then drives delegation directly:

aux4 jobs run --command "aux4 ai agent ask 'verify the KALLAX product URL and return it'" --onComplete "aux4 queue send --name self.inbox ..."
aux4 jobs status --id <id>
aux4 jobs output --id <id>

What the Methodology Covers

  • When to delegate (and when not) — delegate work that's too slow, parallel, scheduled, or genuinely a separate agent's; do trivial/quick work directly in-turn.
  • Dispatch — launch a background job with aux4 jobs run --command ... --onComplete ..., tell the user you're on it, and capture the job id.
  • Monitor — aux4 jobs status/output/tail/list; aux4 poll to wait-until-condition; aux4 cron for recurring checks — never sleep.
  • React — read the output; on success process and save, on failure diagnose, fix it yourself, and retry before escalating.
  • Self-delegation — aux4 jobs run "aux4 ai agent ask '<one concrete goal>'" gives a fresh context window; one concrete goal per subtask.
  • Parallelize / hand off — fan out 2–3 jobs at once and merge results; coordinate other agents via aux4 queue/channel messages.
  • Clean up — remove/kill finished or stuck jobs and cancel stale schedules.

Read the full guidance with aux4 ai skill delegate prompt.

Commands

This is an instruction skill — it contributes one command to the shared ai:skill profile.

| Command | Description | |---------|-------------| | aux4 ai skill delegate prompt | Print the delegation methodology (when to delegate, dispatch/monitor/react, self-delegation, parallel + multi-agent) |

Native Skill Contract

This package conforms to the native aux4 skill contract:

  • scope agent, name skill-delegate — depends on aux4/ai-skill only; never on aux4/jobs, aux4/ai-agent, or aux4/copilot. It is pure methodology; the agent that uses it already has jobs/cron/poll/queue.
  • help.text everywhere — the required discovery layer (aux4 ai skill delegate --help).
  • man/ai_skill_delegate__prompt.md and man/ai_skill__delegate.md — the "is this a good fit?" tier.
  • prompt — the methodology itself; this is an instruction skill so prompt is its primary surface.
  • No run, no domain commands — running a skill is a runtime concern of aux4/ai-agent, and this skill teaches a method rather than performing a deterministic capability.

Verify conformance:

aux4 ai skill validate delegate
aux4 ai skill list

License

This package is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License.

See LICENSE for details.