intersystems-ready-hackathon/ready-2026-team-09/ai-hub-subagents-and-skills

AI Hub SubAgents and Skills

Use this skill when the problem is decomposition: programmatic sub-agents, nested-agent workflows, or reusable %AI.Skill definitions.

When to Use

• Deciding between %AI.SubAgent and %AI.Skill
• Implementing delegate-task or recursive-agent patterns
• Exporting or loading skills from external SKILL.md sources
• Building a parent agent that hands specialized work to child agents

Core Workflow

1. Decide whether the child capability should be programmatic, reusable, or externally shareable.
2. Use %AI.SubAgent when the parent controls creation directly in code.
3. Use %AI.Skill when the capability should be a discoverable tool with metadata and optional tool dependencies.
4. Register the child capability with the parent agent.
5. Keep cost and latency in mind when nesting calls.

Critical Rules

• %AI.SubAgent is the simple programmatic path.
• %AI.Skill is the structured, reusable, shareable path.
• Delegate-task tools are an implementation pattern, not the only way to do nested agents.
• Pair this skill with ai-hub-toolsets when the child agent needs its own tool surface.

Common Mistakes

• Treating %AI.Skill as just a prompt snippet instead of a tool-registerable sub-agent
• Using nested delegation without a clear reason to split the work
• Ignoring the extra model calls and latency that come with each delegated step
• Assuming external SKILL.md loading behaves like a plain local class without validation

References

• SubAgents and Skills reference