c0d7ef22ec
Master landed the tool-subagent depth budget while this branch was in flight: the numeric default maxDepth now fails the mount against the ACP provider's depthLimit: false, so the composition fixture must state maxDepth: 'provider-managed' — the documented opt-out for a provider whose recursion budget lives in the child harness. The fixture also moves off the retired stdio-demo REPL onto the current app-boot driver pattern (runLoaderSmoke + one-shot cli), and the split isDirectory statements gain the file-not-a-directory case the single-expression form used to cover implicitly.
subagent/ — subagent capability family
The subagent seam: an agent delegating work to a child agent. Like the bash and llm families this is a capability seam (see capability seams) — but with one defining difference: multiple provider implementations coexist in one context, registered by name, rather than the single-implementation bash shape. The registry mirrors the LLM adapter registry.
| Package | Role | ctx key |
|---|---|---|
subagent/ |
Abstract subagent seam: named-provider registry + vocabulary | ctx.subagents |
subagent-inprocess/ |
Shared in-process run driver (no provider; one cleanup effect per run) | — |
subagent-spawn/ |
In-process backend: a fresh child agent | (registers on ctx.subagents) |
subagent-fork/ |
In-process backend: a child seeded with the parent's completed-turn prefix | (registers on ctx.subagents) |
subagent-subprocess/ |
Shared out-of-process machinery: env scrub, dispose ladder, isolated config dirs (pure lib; registers nothing) | — |
subagent-acp/ |
Out-of-process backend: a child agent in a spawned subprocess, driven over ACP | (registers on ctx.subagents) |
tool-subagent/ |
Model-facing subagent delegation tool over ctx.subagents |
(registers on ctx.tools) |
The interface lives at subagent/subagent/. The in-process subagent-spawn / subagent-fork backends share the subagent-inprocess driver (a library with no provider of its own — both depend on it, neither on the other), and the out-of-process subagent-acp backend builds on the subagent-subprocess library (the credential env scrub, the dispose ladder, isolated config dirs). Tests replace only the child boundary with package-local fixtures.
The proposal and design rationale: .agents/notes/implemented/feature/2026-06-21-subagent-capability-seam.md.