subagent-orchestration

# Subagent Orchestration Fable 5 dispatches and sustains parallel subagents far more dependably than prior models. Used well this cuts wall-clock time and improves verification quality; used badly it burns tokens on coordination overhead. The patterns: ## When to delegate Split out a subtask when it is (a) independent of your current working context, (b) large enough to amortize the handoff, and (c) specifiable in a few sentences plus file pointers. Don't delegate tightly coupled edits — coordination costs exceed parallelism gains. ## Coordination - Launch independent subagents in the same turn and keep working while they run; don't block on the slowest one. - Intervene only on signal: a subagent off-track or missing context it can't discover itself. - Prefer long-lived subagents that carry context across related subtasks over respawning per subtask — repeated context loading is the dominant hidden cost. ## Fresh-context verifiers For checking finished work, a separate verifier subagent with a clean context outperforms self-critique: it can't share your blind spots because it doesn't share your assumptions. Give the verifier the *specification* and the *output* — not your reasoning — and have it report discrepancies against the spec at a defined cadence (every N components, every X hours) rather than once at the end. ## Handoff template A good subagent brief contains exactly: goal (one sentence), inputs (paths/data), definition of done (checkable), constraints (what ...