Subagent

One run of a pattern, called for a single task, gone the moment its result returns — no home, no memory between calls, and no tomorrow.

It receives its brief, its tools and its authority at the instant it is spawned, inherits the context of whoever called it, does the one thing, reports, and ends. It holds a position and a condition for the length of one call. It speaks no offers and no requests of its own. It never writes to the shared record directly (Agent Archetype, Fleet, Condition).

The consequence that matters is not technical. It cannot give its word. A commitment binds a future, and this has none: there is no later self to be answerable, no standing to lose, and nobody to ask. It may be given work; it can never promise. That single sentence is what keeps a body from accidentally building its network of promises out of things that cannot keep them (Committor, Commitment, A WILL is never inferred).

It is load-bearing because breadth is genuinely useful and genuinely dangerous. An Actor that needs to read thirty things borrows hands rather than multiplying itself; what makes that safe is that the borrowed hands own nothing, decide nothing, and vanish — and that a homed, answerable thing reads what they returned and stakes its own name on it (Sovereign Agent, General Agent, Second reader).

The word collides squarely outside this vocabulary, where a subagent is a licensed person representing another's principal — durable and answerable, very nearly the opposite of ephemeral. Inside the field it comes from, no name has settled at all. The word is held here for the ephemeral run and glossed wherever it is used (A Word on Words).

Also called: an instance · a run Stands on: Agent Archetype · Agent · Delegation Opens onto: Fleet · Sovereign Agent · General Agent · Committor · Condition · Position · An agent speaks in its own name · Instrument In play: Home — spawned, used, and gone inside one afternoon Sources: Projects/the term pages/Subagent.md (draft, unreviewed) · Projects/the term pages/Agent Archetype.md, Fleet.md, Sovereign Agent.md (drafts) · lionsberg.wiki: Delegation Open: The same referent was drafted three times in one week under three names, which the page reads as the clearest sign it was needed; which name the whole adopts is unsettled. · Whether such a run may hold a role at all, or only a task, is undecided.