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Multi-agent

Parallel specialist lanes

Status: active

Parallel specialist lanes let one Gateway route different chats or rooms to different agents while keeping the user experience fast. Treat parallelism as a scarce-resource design problem, not just "more agents".

First principles

A specialist lane only improves throughput when it reduces contention for the real bottlenecks:

  • Session locks: only one run should mutate a given session at a time.
  • Global model capacity: all visible chat runs still share provider limits.
  • Tool capacity: shell, browser, network, and repository work can be slower than the model turn itself.
  • Context budget: long transcripts make every future turn slower and less focused.
  • Ownership ambiguity: duplicate agents doing the same job waste capacity.

OpenClaw already serializes runs per session and caps global parallelism through the command queue. Specialist lanes add policy on top: which agent owns which work, what stays in chat, and what becomes background work.

Phase 1: lane contracts + background heavy work

Give every lane a written contract in its workspace and system prompt:

  • Purpose: the work this lane owns.
  • Non-goals: work it should hand off instead of attempting.
  • Chat budget: quick answers stay in chat; long tasks acknowledge briefly, then run in a background sub-agent or task.
  • Handoff rule: when another lane owns the work, say where it should go and provide a compact handoff summary.
  • Tool-risk rule: prefer the smallest tool surface that can do the job.

This is the cheapest phase and fixes most clogging: one coding job no longer turns the research lane into molasses, and each chat keeps its own context clean.

Phase 2: priority and concurrency controls

Tune queue and model capacity around the business value of each lane:

json5
{  agents: {    defaults: {      maxConcurrent: 4,      subagents: { maxConcurrent: 8, delegationMode: "prefer" },    },  },  messages: {    queue: {      mode: "collect",      debounceMs: 1000,      cap: 20,      drop: "summarize",    },  },}

Use direct/personal chats and production-ops agents for high-priority work. Let research, drafting, and batch coding move to background tasks when the system is busy.

Phase 3: coordinator / traffic controller

Add a small coordinator pattern once multiple lanes are active:

  • Track active lane tasks and owners.
  • Detect duplicate requests across groups.
  • Route handoff summaries between lanes.
  • Surface only blockers, completed results, and decisions the human must make.

Do not start here. A coordinator without lane contracts just coordinates chaos.

Minimal lane contract template

md
# Lane contract ## Owns - <job this lane is responsible for> ## Does not own - <work to hand off> ## Chat budget - Answer quick questions directly.- For multi-step, slow, or tool-heavy work: acknowledge briefly, spawn/background  the work, then return the result when complete. ## Handoff If another lane owns the request, reply with: - target lane- objective- relevant context- exact next action ## Tool posture Use the smallest tool surface that can complete the task. Avoid broad shell ornetwork work unless this lane explicitly owns it.
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