Subagents and jobs

A subagent is a child execution context with parent links. A job is durable batch or background work that can contain many items. Both can be assigned to an agent task, but neither replaces task semantics.

Use the Agent task contract for objective, lifecycle, attempts, relationships, acceptance, and recovery. Use this contract for child agent coordination and batch/background item processing.

Subagents

A subagent SHOULD include subagent_id, parent ids, child thread_id, role, nickname, isolation rules, model policy, status, and last message ref.

Events include subagent.spawned, subagent.input, subagent.status, subagent.output, subagent.completed, subagent.failed, and subagent.closed.

Parent-child edges SHOULD be durable enough to list direct children and descendants after restart.

Jobs

A job SHOULD include job_id, optional task_id, status, instruction ref, input refs, optional output schema ref, max runtime, item cursor, progress counts, and assigned thread ids.

Job item status SHOULD be independent: pending, running, completed, failed, reported. Failed items SHOULD keep attempt count, last error, retryability, and assigned thread.

Events include job.created, job.started, job.progress, job.item.started, job.item.completed, job.item.failed, job.completed, job.failed, and job.cancelled.