Spawning Helper Agents
The Agent Orchestration ability does more than hand a conversation off (see
Delegation & Hand-off) — it lets one agent **spawn brand-new helper agents on the
spot** to get work done, and stay on top of them.
Spawning on the spot. When an agent hits a piece of work worth splitting off, it
creates a helper right then. It either writes a short instruction for the helper itself,
or clones the prompt of an existing agent that already fits the task. The helper gets its
own real session, so this is not a one-shot "send a blind message, get one reply" — the
orchestrator can hold a genuine back-and-forth with its helper, and every exchange is
saved like any normal conversation.
Visible and tagged. A spawned session shows up in your session list with a **spawn
badge**, so you can always see what a helper was asked to do and read the whole exchange.
Nothing runs invisibly behind your back.
Wait or fork. Each time it spawns, the orchestrator declares its intent up front:
- Wait — pause, use the helper's answer the moment it's ready, then carry on. Best
when the next step depends on the result.
- Fork — let the helper go off and work on its own; the orchestrator keeps going and
is automatically nudged back when the helper finishes. Best for parallel work.
Follow-up timers (durable). For helpers that are off doing their own thing, the
orchestrator can set follow-up timers to check in on them later. These are stored
durably through the scheduler, so a check-in still fires even if the server restarts
in between — the orchestrator won't forget to oversee a long-running spawn.
Like the rest of orchestration, this is opt-in: it lives behind the off-by-default
Agent Orchestration ability. And a spawned helper never inherits the spawn tools
itself, so helpers can't endlessly spawn more helpers.
Related: Delegation & Hand-off, The Prompt Optimizer, Abilities,
Sessions & Conversation History, Automation, Events & Scheduling.