Subagents

The main coding agent can delegate self-contained work to subagents — separate agents that run the task in their own fresh context with their own (usually narrower) toolset, and hand back only their final report. Exploration happens in the child; conclusions come back. Long sessions stay coherent because reading twenty files to answer "how does billing work?" no longer costs the main conversation twenty files of context.

Two subagents ship enabled:

Name	What it does
explorer	Read-only codebase exploration — locates files, traces how a feature works across classes, reports back with precise file references.
test-writer	Writes a Pest test file for a class or behaviour and runs it.

The agent decides when to delegate (its instructions steer it toward broad research and away from small lookups), calling the Delegate tool with a subagent name and a complete brief. You'll see the call in the session like any other tool call.

Guarantees

• Shared budget. Subagent token usage records into the same BudgetTracker as the parent session — delegation cannot exceed your spend limit, and a subagent is stopped mid-task if it exhausts it.
• Same safety layer. Subagent tools go through PathGuard, allowlists, hooks, and ToolCalling/ToolCalledevents — exactly like the parent's.
• One level deep. A subagent cannot delegate further.
• No user prompts. Subagents never ask questions; they make judgment calls and note them in the report.
• Fail-soft. A subagent that crashes returns an error message to the parent agent, which continues the session.

Adding your own

Register any Tackle\Contracts\CodingAgent implementation in config/tackle.php — including agents you've written (see Custom Agents):

'subagents' => [
    'explorer' => [
        'agent' => \Tackle\Agents\ExplorerAgent::class,
        'description' => 'Read-only codebase exploration...',
    ],
    'schema-expert' => [
        'agent' => \App\Ai\SchemaExpertAgent::class,
        'description' => 'Answers questions about the database schema, migrations, and model relationships.',
    ],
],

The description is what the delegating model reads when deciding where to send work — write it like a tool description. Set subagents to an empty array to remove the Delegate tool entirely.