Agent Delegation

Agent Delegation

Schedule AI agents to run on a cron schedule or delegate subtasks from one agent to another. Requires the claw plugin (ɳClaw bundle, $0.99/mo).

What It Does

Agent delegation lets one agent hand off a bounded task to a subagent with an inherited, never-escalated permission scope. At P95, the primary entry point is cron-triggered agents: schedule any agent to run automatically using a standard cron expression.

The full multi-agent runtime (A→B during a conversation, result routing, agent memory sharing) ships in v1.2.

Requirements

• claw plugin installed and licensed
• cron plugin installed
• PLUGIN_CLAW_INTERNAL_URL set (or default http://plugin-claw:3710 reachable)

Schedule an Agent via Cron

nself cron add \
  --agent assistant \
  --context '{"task":"send morning briefing"}' \
  --schedule "0 9 * * *" \
  --name "morning-briefing"

• --agent: agent ID to invoke
• --context: JSON context forwarded to the agent
• --schedule: standard 5-field cron expression (timezone via --timezone America/New_York)
• The job owner’s RBAC scope is inherited by the subagent automatically

Permission Inheritance

A delegated agent inherits the job owner’s permissions. It cannot escalate, if a requested tool is not in the owner’s ACL, the delegation is rejected before the job is enqueued.

Owner has: [email.read, calendar.list, notes.write]
Agent requests: [email.read, calendar.list]   ← OK
Agent requests: [finance.transfer]             ← Rejected: ErrPermissionEscalation

Failure Handling

Situation	Default behavior
Agent times out (default 120s)	Return partial result to caller
3 consecutive failures in 60s	Circuit breaker opens for 30s
Sensitive tool invoked	Pause and surface approval in nclaw UI

Override the timeout globally via CRON_AGENT_TIMEOUT_SECS.

Override failure behavior per-deploy in plugin.yaml:

agent_delegation:
  timeout_seconds: 300
  on_failure: escalate_human   # return_partial | escalate_human | abort
  human_handoff_tools:
    - email.send
    - finance.transfer

How It Works

When a cron job with delivery: agent fires, the cron scheduler calls the claw plugin’s internal /internal/agent/handoff endpoint. The claw plugin writes the handoff envelope to np_agent_handoffs with status: queued. The v1.2 runtime will dequeue and execute it.

Coming in v1.2

• In-conversation A→B delegation (agent delegates a subtask mid-reasoning-loop)
• Result routing back to the calling agent
• Agent memory sharing between delegating and delegated agents
• Admin UI showing the handoff queue