Recursive Sub-Task Delegation

Key Takeaways

• Recursive delegation works only when each delegation level carries an explicit bounded contract — input schema, output schema, and max-depth — identical in principle to a versioned API contract between service tiers.
• Context-window budget must be partitioned per depth level before execution begins; a parent agent that retains full context instead of summarising and delegating a scoped context will exhaust the window before leaf agents can complete.
• Every child agent must emit a structured result that the parent can validate against a pre-agreed JSON schema — without this schema-validation gate, errors at depth N silently corrupt aggregation at depth N-1 and surface only at the root, making debugging exponentially harder.
• Memory anchor: treat recursive delegation exactly like a config-cascade with schema-validation — each level receives a scoped config slice, transforms it within contract, and returns a validated payload upward; the orchestrator owns the cascade definition, not the execution detail.