Unbounded Subagent Spawn
A supervisor spawns sub-agents that can spawn their own sub-agents — with no global cap on the tree size or recursion depth.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Allowing each parent agent to spawn child agents that can themselves spawn further children — with no cap on total tree size or recursion depth.
📋 Context
Supervisor/orchestrator/researcher patterns decompose tasks by spawning sub-agents. That’’s the design. The problem: there’’s no global cap. A sufficiently complex task can spawn a tree of hundreds of agents, each burning tokens, before anyone notices.
💡 Solution
Maintain a global step budget across all descendants of a root request. Cap fan-out per supervisor (typically 5–10 children). Track parent_run_id in lineage so the full agent tree is inspectable. Pair with a kill-switch for emergency halt of the entire tree.
Real-world Use Case
- Never use this; fan-out without a global cap can recursively explode the agent tree.
- Maintain a global step budget across all descendants of a root request.
- Cap fan-out per supervisor and track parent_run_id for inspectability.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Enforce a global step budget and fan-out cap across the entire agent tree — recursive spawning without limits is a cost catastrophe.
Disadvantages
- Catastrophic cost spikes from runaway decomposition before any alarm fires
- Untracked descendants survive a top-level halt — they keep running
- Provider rate limits cascade through the tree, producing cascading failures