Agent Modes

SWUST Code places the primary agent, goal, compose, subagents, and system agents inside one runtime model. The practical benefit is that planning, execution, review, resume, and consolidation do not have to depend on disconnected subsystems.

One Runtime, Different Roles

In everyday use, it helps to think of SWUST Code as a coordinated role system:

• the primary agent drives the main thread of work
• plan handles read-only exploration and solution shaping
• compose handles planning, parallelization, review, and merge structure
• goal handles continued work against a stop condition
• subagents handle delegated task units
• system agents handle checkpoints, memory consolidation, and workflow packaging

Because these roles share one runtime path, they can reuse task state, context recovery, and execution boundaries more cleanly.

Primary Agent Roles

Agent	Best used for
build	default implementation, fixing, direct tool use
plan	read-only investigation, design, risk assessment
compose	large-task decomposition, parallel work, review, verification, merge
goal	autonomous continuation with an explicit stop condition

If you already know the next step, build or plan is often enough. compose and goal become more valuable once the work needs explicit orchestration.

How Subagents Participate

Subagents are role extensions inside the current work chain:

• they can advance an isolated subtask
• they can run in the foreground or continue in the background
• their results and state flow back into the main task path
• they can participate in the same checkpoint, task, and memory lifecycle

The runtime also uses dedicated system agents such as:

• checkpoint-writer
• dream
• distill

You usually do not manage those directly. They handle checkpoints, memory consolidation, and flow packaging in the background.

Project-Level /subagent Configuration

The current mainline adds a project-level configuration entry point for visible subagents:

• /subagent
• /subagents

From that interface, you can set for each visible subagent:

• a dedicated model
• a dedicated reasoning variant
• a max-step limit
• or clear overrides and return to the default behavior

These settings live at the project level and do not become global defaults. They are useful for repository-specific role control, such as:

• faster, cheaper investigation subagents
• stronger review subagents with heavier reasoning
• tightly bounded verifier subagents with short step budgets

How compose, goal, And Subagents Relate

These three capabilities are often lumped together, but they solve different problems:

Capability	Main job
compose	give a complex task structure and phases
goal	keep checking whether the task is actually done before stopping
subagents	hand local units of work to separate roles

A common large-task flow looks like this:

1. use plan or compose to understand and break down the work
2. use subagents for investigation, implementation, or verification
3. use goal to prevent premature stopping
4. let checkpoints take over when session pressure grows

When To Use Which

Situation	Recommended path
quick implementation or bug fix	build
read-only repository exploration	plan
large task with decomposition and review	compose
explicit objective with continued execution	goal
isolated role for one local task	subagent
long-session recovery or knowledge consolidation	checkpoint-writer, dream, distill