Subagents & orchestration

Subagents are short-lived background agents that run in parallel to your main conversation. Use them to research, prototype, or investigate something without blocking your current work.

Ask in any chat session:

• "Research these three options in parallel and recommend one."
• "Check my open CRs, the pipeline status, and whether the deploy landed — all at once."
• "In parallel, run this test in 6 languages."

Crew spawns isolated subagents and brings their results back into your conversation. You don't need to invoke any command — the agent decides when parallel work makes sense.

You can also watch running subagents in the Activity panel: each one shows its task, elapsed time, and a Stop button.

kirocrew spawn run "check my open CRs"        # blocking — waits for the result
kirocrew spawn run --async "check CRs"        # fire-and-forget
kirocrew spawn list                           # see running subagents

When subagents are running:

• The Activity panel shows each one with its task description, elapsed time, and status (running / done / failed / stalled)
• When a subagent finishes, its result is injected into your conversation — the agent summarizes it in its next response
• For a batch of parallel work, results arrive incrementally as each subagent completes

You don't need to poll or check back — results come to you.

Each subagent gets its own independent session with full memory injection (your preferences, lessons, project context). But it doesn't see your current conversation's in-progress work — this keeps your main session lean and prevents subagents from interfering with each other.

• Stop one — click the Stop button on its row in the Activity panel
• Stop all — header Stop-all control in the Activity panel
• Retry a failed one — click "Retry" on a failed subagent's row (spawns a fresh attempt with the same task)

Stopping is neutral — partial output is preserved and marked as "stopped by user," not as a failure.

• Concurrency — there's a cap on how many subagents run simultaneously (auto-sized based on your machine's resources, usually 3–32). Extra requests are queued until a slot opens.
• Timeout — each subagent has a 30-minute hard timeout. If it's still running after that, it's force-stopped.
• Stall detection — if a subagent shows no activity for ~2 minutes, a warning appears on its row. It's not auto-killed — you decide whether to stop it or let it continue.

Subagents inherit your session's approval mode:

• Autopilot on — subagent tool calls are auto-approved (deny rules still apply)
• Autopilot off — tool calls that need approval are either denied by default (headless channels) or prompt you (dashboard)

You don't configure approval per-subagent — it follows whatever your main session is set to.

When a subagent's output is long, your conversation gets a summary. To read the full transcript:

• Click the subagent in the Activity panel to expand its output
• Or ask: "show me the full output from subagent X"

Results are retained for about an hour after delivery, then cleaned up.