The fleet

Five subagents, what each returns, and why it is a pointer.

The fleet

Five standing roles. Each is one file in .claude/agents/.

Agent	Model	Effort	Hands back
Researcher	Opus	xhigh	findings + reasoning on an open question
Historian	Haiku	low	URLs only — commits, PRs, threads
Librarian	Sonnet	high	a local `.md` path, pulled via context7
Designer	Opus	medium	an `.md` of ASCII diagrams + captions
Writer	Opus	high	a finished page under `docs/` — path only

The rule that makes it work

  Researcher ─┐
  Historian  ─┤
  Librarian  ─┼──▶  a POINTER  ──▶  lead agent
  Designer   ─┤     not prose       context stays clean
  Writer     ─┘

A subagent that returns three paragraphs has spent your lead’s context. One that returns a URL or a file path costs almost nothing, and the lead opens it only if it needs to. Cheap models can hold the expensive roles because fetching is not thinking.

A real definition

---
name: historian
description: Returns URLs to relevant git and web history. Never summarizes.
model: haiku
effort: low
tools: [Bash, Read, Grep, WebFetch, SendMessage]
---

name description model effort tools are all real frontmatter keys. SendMessage is the one that matters as a teammate: without it in tools, a tmux pane can spawn, work, and go idle with nowhere to put its answer.

“Persistent” means resumed

Subagents spawn fresh per invocation — there is no always-on daemon. SendMessage to an agent’s name reattaches the same agent with its full history, tool calls and results intact. Persistence is a habit, not a setting: resume the Historian instead of spawning a second one.