hyperhive/claude-plugins/plugins/base/skills/claude-subagents/SKILL.md

name

description

claude-subagents

Spin up a short-lived headless `claude` sub-instance to grind through a well-scoped, mechanical batch (bulk relabeling, a repetitive find/replace, a mechanical migration) instead of burning your own context on it inline. Use this when a task has a clear, describable recipe and is either big enough to eat your context or long enough that you'd rather not babysit it. Not for judgement-heavy work, anything needing operator back-and-forth, or a task whose blast radius you can't bound up front.

Ephemeral Sub-Agents

A sub-instance you spawn inherits the same filesystem and credentials you have. This is a first-class tool for offloading a bounded, mechanical batch.

When to use it

• Yes: mechanical batches with a clear recipe (relabel N issues, rewrite a call-site pattern, migrate a config field), especially when the batch would eat your context or take long enough that you'd rather not babysit it turn-by-turn.
• No: judgement-heavy work, anything needing back-and-forth with a human, or a task whose blast radius you can't bound up front.

The subagent MCP tools

Your container's subagent MCP server (hive-subagent-daemon) runs this skill's recipe for you:

start(name, prompt_file, model?, trigger?)
continue(name, prompt, model?)
status(name)
interrupt(name, force?)

start and continue return as soon as the process is confirmed running, not once it finishes — a completion lands as a todo (get_loose_ends), same as any other producer. Use status for a zero-cost "is it still going" check; reach for continue only once you actually have a new instruction for it, since that spends a turn. interrupt genuinely stops a running turn (force: true for SIGKILL).

Model choice, prompt hygiene, splitting big batches, verify-then-report — everything else in this skill — applies exactly the same whether you're calling the tool or thinking through the recipe by hand.

Prompt hygiene - this is where batches succeed or fail

• Concrete constants, not "figure it out": exact ids, field names, option values, endpoints.
• Critical ordering rules, spelled out - the sub-agent won't infer invariants you don't state.
• Explicit scope + exemptions, plus a fallback rule for ambiguous cases: "leave it as-is where genuinely unclear; do not guess."
• Ask for a report file - per-item results + anything skipped and why, so you can verify without re-deriving.
• Tune on ONE item first, eyeball the result, fix the prompt, then turn it loose on the full batch. A prompt bug replicated across 100 items is 100 cleanups.

Split a big independent batch across parallel subagents

One subagent is a sequential worker — a 50-item batch takes roughly 50 items' worth of wall-clock even though nothing about the recipe forces serialization. If the items are independent (each one touches its own file/issue/row, nothing depends on another item's result) and the batch is big enough that wall-clock matters, chunk it across N subagents running at once instead of handing the whole thing to one.

• Split by natural boundaries, not an arbitrary item count — one subagent per file, per directory, per module, per label, whatever grouping keeps each worker's slice self-contained. A worker that has to coordinate with another worker mid-task isn't actually independent work; re-scope the split until it is.
• Isolate each worker's writes. For a git-based batch, give each worker its own git worktree (own working directory, own branch, same underlying repo — cheap, no full reclone) so N workers editing different files never race on the same working tree or index. For a non-git batch (issue relabeling, API calls), independent items don't need filesystem isolation at all — just launch N in parallel.
• Launch all N and don't babysit any single one — same as the one-subagent case, just N start calls instead of one. Check on them as a batch, not by polling each individually in a loop.
• Mind the container's memory cap before picking N. Your whole container shares one MemoryMax (a few GB by default) with every subagent you spawn and your own process. A claude process plus its MCP servers can hold several hundred MB to ~1GB depending on the task; spawning a dozen at once on a small container doesn't just slow things down, it can OOM the whole container — taking your own in-flight turn down with it, not just the subagents. Rule of thumb: 2-4 concurrent workers on a default-sized container; check free -h (or ask whoever owns the container's config for its MemoryMax) before going higher, and chunk a bigger batch into successive waves of that size rather than firing everything at once.
• You own the merge. Once all N report done, review + verify each worker's slice (same "don't trust the self-report blind" rule as below), then combine — for a git-based split, that's you merging N branches (or cherry-picking) into one, not each worker pushing/PRing its own slice.

Skip this for a batch small enough to finish in a couple minutes single- threaded — the coordination overhead isn't worth it below that size.

Resume for follow-ups

continue reuses the same session, so the sub-agent keeps every constant and gotcha it already discovered instead of re-learning the surface from a cold prompt. Reach for start under a new name only for a genuinely unrelated task.

Verify, then report

On completion: read the report file, spot-check a handful of results yourself (don't trust the self-report blind), then summarize. Surface anything the sub-agent left ambiguous or exempted for a human call.

Pitfalls (all observed in practice)

• Using a model bigger than yourself → paying premium cost for mechanical work that didn't need it.
• Skipping the one-item tuning pass → a systematic mistake smeared across the whole batch.
• start-ing fresh instead of continue-ing for a follow-up → throws away all the context the first pass earned.
• Baking an unverified assumption into the recipe - if a quick check suggests something "isn't possible" or "doesn't exist," confirm it before writing that conclusion into the prompt; a wrong assumption gets replicated across the whole batch.
• Handing a big independent batch to one subagent instead of splitting it across several in parallel - a 50-item sequential run burns wall- clock the split-by-worktree approach above would've avoided for free.