Subagents

Subagents let a chat delegate a bounded task to another model — local or remote — or to one of your saved agents, and get a compact result back without cluttering the conversation. Offload research to a bigger cloud model, hand a coding question to a specialist agent, or generate an image, all mid-turn.

Delegation is off by default, approved on first use, and configured per agent.

The two spawn tools

Tool	What it does
spawn_agent(input, agent)	Delegate a task to one of your saved agents — it runs with that agent's prompts, tools, and context
spawn_model(input, model)	Delegate to a bare model (no persona) — useful for "ask a bigger/faster model" moments

The subagent runs its own bounded job and returns a single compact result. Its inner steps render live in the chat row but never enter your conversation's transcript, so context stays lean.

Two more capabilities share the same machinery and the same per-agent settings surface:

• image — generate or edit a picture inline; see Image Generation
• computer_use — drive a macOS app; see Computer Use

Getting started

1. Open Agents → Configure → Subagents on the agent you want to grant delegation (the main chat has its own Subagents tab too).
2. Enable Spawn & Delegation and pick the spawnable pool — which saved agents and models this agent may delegate to. The pool is searchable, and you can attach a note to each entry to tell the model when to use it.
3. Ask for something that benefits from delegation: "Have the research agent summarize this paper, then continue."
4. Approve the first use. You can set individual targets to always-allow in the same tab.

Residency handoff

Delegation works in any direction — local to local, local to remote, remote to local, remote to remote. Only one case touches GPU memory: delegating from a local model to a different local model.

Direction	Behavior
Local → same local model	Runs in place — no swap
Local → different local model (handoff on)	Unload the chat model, run the job, reload, continue
Local → different local model (handoff off)	Rejected up front — nothing is evicted
Local ↔ remote, remote ↔ remote	Runs in place

The Local Orchestrator Handoff toggle (on by default) lives in Settings → Subagents, next to the RAM-safety preflight and the image load policy. With handoff on, two large models never fight for memory; with it off, Osaurus refuses the delegation cleanly instead of erroring mid-run.

Per-agent configuration

Everything is scoped to the agent, in its Subagents tab:

• Spawn & Delegation — enable, plus the allow-list of spawnable agents and models
• Image — enable the image tool and pick the agent's image model
• Computer Use — enable, autonomy ceiling, screen context (details)
• AppleScript — enable the AppleScript subagent and pick its model

Every capability ships disabled on every agent, so nothing can delegate until you say so.

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Related:

• Agents — creating and configuring agents
• Image Generation — the image subagent
• Computer Use — the computer_use subagent
• Models — local and remote models a subagent can target