Five-Field Delegation Brief
The smallest brief that reliably produces usable work from a sub-agent.
Five fields — task with its reason, context, output shape, limits, and required self-verification. The reason field is the one that changes results, because a sub-agent that knows why can make the small judgement calls the brief did not anticipate.
What it is
A brief for delegating one task to a sub-agent.
**TASK + WHY**
What to do — and why it matters. The second half is not
decoration; it decides every judgement call you did not anticipate.
**CONTEXT**
What exists already, what was tried, what constrains this.
Sub-agents start with no history.
**OUTPUT**
Format, length, structure. And what NOT to produce.
**LIMITS**
Source requirements · confidence marking · what to do when
uncertain · explicit permission to return "not found".
**VERIFICATION**
Ask it to state: how many independent sources, which claims
rest on one, and the single thing it is least sure about.How to use
Fill all 5 fields. In roughly 200 briefs the pattern is consistent: the ones that came back unusable were missing either the reason or the limits, and almost never the context.
Fill all five. The temptation is to skip limits and verification because they feel like overhead on a simple task — those two are the difference between a report you can use and a report you have to check by hand.
The single highest-yield line is 1 sentence of permission to fail. Without an explicit "if you cannot find it, say so", an agent optimising for a complete-looking answer produces one, and the gap is invisible.
One more property worth keeping: the brief fits on a screen. A delegation brief that runs past that is usually a task that should have been split into 2, and splitting it is cheaper than writing the longer brief.
What to fill in
Everything. But if you only have time for two fields, use why and verification — the first improves the work, the second tells you how much to trust it.
License
MIT.
$ head -12 dl-handoff-template.md
$ cite dl-handoff-template
Citation id SV-8876 is stable. It resolves at
https://stillvalid.dev/c/SV-8876 even if this artifact moves to another section,
which a bare URL does not survive. The verification date is part of the citation on
purpose — this site says out loud when it last checked.
[Five-Field Delegation Brief](https://stillvalid.dev/downloads/dl-handoff-template) — stillvalid, SV-8876 (artifact, verified 2026-08-14)