Delegate to Free Workers

Orchestrator-worker pattern: the expensive model (you) decomposes and verifies; free models execute. Read learnings.md beside this file before delegating; append entries when a worker surprises you (good or bad).

Governing Principle

Delegate the tokens, keep the judgment. A worker sees ONLY what you send it — no conversation, no repo, no CLAUDE.md. Every delegation is a self-contained brief. Every result is reviewed before it touches the codebase.

Procedure

1. Classify the subtask (routing table in CLAUDE.md is authoritative):
   • --role code — draft a function/component/schema from a complete spec
   • --role reason — analysis, tradeoff enumeration, explanation drafts
   • --role bulk — summarize/extract from large inputs (1M context)
   • --role design — first-pass UI markup (you do the taste pass after)
   • --role general — everything else mechanical
2. Brief per references/worker-prompting.md: constraints first, reference files in the middle, the exact ask + output format + acceptance criteria last (fights lost-in-the-middle). Attach files with --file; if it needs more than ~3 files of context, it's too entangled to delegate.
3. Dispatch: node .claude/tools/ask-worker.mjs --role <role> [--file <path>]... "<brief>" (long briefs via stdin: end with -). Multi-provider fallback, per-endpoint retry with backoff, and chain sweeps are built in — a congested provider falls through to the next automatically. Pin one with --provider <groq|cerebras|openrouter|gemini> if needed.
4. Verify (chain-of-verification, never skip): read the output as a hostile reviewer — check it against the acceptance criteria, the repo's patterns (/patterns), and type-reality. Workers hallucinate imports and APIs; you ground them.
5. Integrate or escalate: apply what survives review, rewrite what doesn't. Confirm the completion marker was present (cheap done-check). Three failed rounds on the same brief = stop delegating; Opus does it.

Never delegate

• Anything touching auth, sessions, security, or migrations
• Multi-file refactors or work needing live repo navigation
• Final design-taste decisions and anything committed without review
• Secrets or .env contents in a brief — workers are third-party APIs; some free routes log prompts

Handoffs

• Worker output needs pattern conformance → /patterns. Draft UI needs the taste pass → /creative-ui. Integrated work → /full-review.