Handoff and managed agents

Fan work out to parallel child sessions with agent_spawn and session_manage, and compact a session's context at a milestone with the handoff tool.

Opulent can split a large piece of work across several sessions running at once, and it can compact its own context at a milestone. These are two separate mechanisms, and this page covers both:

• Managed agents / parallel child sessions — a parent session spawns child sessions that run concurrently, each in its own Run, using the agent_spawn and session_manage tools.
• The handoff tool — context compaction at a milestone. It summarizes and trims the accumulated context so the same session keeps going with a leaner working set. It is not a transfer to a different machine.

When to fan out to child sessions

Delegate to parallel child sessions when a task splits cleanly into parts that can run independently:

• Fan-out research — diligence across several companies, filings, or markets at once
• Batch processing — the same operation applied across many accounts, tickets, or records
• Parallel engineering — running a dev server, hitting endpoints, or building in one child while another edits
• Long-running work — migrations, large refactors, or multi-source data pulls that would otherwise block the parent
• Parallel execution — offload branches of work so the parent keeps coordinating

Managed agents and parallel child sessions

A parent session uses agent_spawn to create one or more child sessions and session_manage to start, monitor, and collect them. Each child session runs as its own managed agent with its own Run and its own context, so children do not share scratchpad state with the parent or with each other.

The parent hands each child a focused prompt and the inputs it needs. Children work concurrently and report back to the parent, which merges the outputs and continues. Because each child is a full session, it has its own sandbox with a shell, browser, and connectors.

The handoff tool

The handoff tool operates inside a single session. When a session reaches a milestone, for example finishing a research phase before drafting, handoff compacts the conversation so far into a durable summary and continues the same session with that compacted context in place of the full transcript.

Use it to keep long sessions focused and within budget:

• At a milestone — one phase is done and the next phase does not need the full detail of the last one
• Before a context-heavy stretch — clear room before a large read or a long generation step
• On handback from children — after merging child results, compact before moving on

handoff does not move the session to another VM and does not create a new session. The session ID, sandbox, and files stay the same. Only the working context is condensed.

What carries across a handoff

Because the session and its sandbox persist, everything on disk and in the stores stays available after a compaction:

• Files and artifacts — the sandbox filesystem, Scratchpad, and Workbench Documents are unchanged.
• Knowledge and Memory — anything written to Knowledge or Memory during the session remains retrievable.
• The milestone summary — the compacted summary replaces the raw transcript, so later steps reason from the summary plus whatever is still on disk.

Related resources