Guide

Sub-Agent Orchestration with OpenClaw and ClawVortex

A practical guide to designing, deploying, and managing sub-agent workflows using OpenClaw's sub-agent capabilities and ClawVortex's visual orchestration tools.

What Are OpenClaw Sub-Agents?

Introduced in OpenClaw's February 2026 release, sub-agents allow a parent agent to spawn child agents at runtime to handle specific subtasks. Unlike static multi-agent pipelines where every agent is defined upfront, sub-agents are created dynamically based on the parent agent's judgment about what help it needs.

This is a fundamental shift. Instead of pre-defining every possible workflow branch, you give your parent agent the authority to decompose complex problems and delegate pieces to specialist sub-agents — each with their own tools, context windows, and SOUL.md instructions.

How Sub-Agent Spawning Works

When a parent agent encounters a task that would benefit from delegation, it can spawn a sub-agent using the spawn_agent tool. The parent defines the sub-agent's role, provides context, and specifies which tools the sub-agent can access.

Sub-agents run in isolation — they have their own context window and cannot access the parent's full conversation history. This is intentional: it prevents context pollution and keeps each agent focused on its specific task. The parent receives a summary of the sub-agent's work when it completes.

Real-World Use Cases

Customer Support Triage

A parent triage agent receives incoming tickets and spawns specialist sub-agents based on the issue type: a billing sub-agent for payment issues, a technical sub-agent for product bugs, and an escalation sub-agent for high-priority cases. Each sub-agent has access only to the tools it needs.

Research and Analysis

A research coordinator agent breaks a complex question into sub-questions and spawns a sub-agent for each. One might search internal documents, another queries external APIs, and a third synthesizes the findings. The parent merges everything into a coherent report.

Code Review Pipelines

A lead reviewer agent spawns sub-agents for different review aspects: one checks for security vulnerabilities, another reviews code style, and a third validates test coverage. The parent compiles a unified review with recommendations.

Designing Sub-Agent Workflows in ClawVortex

Sub-agent orchestration in raw configuration files is complex. You need to define spawn conditions, tool permissions, context passing rules, and result aggregation logic — all in YAML. ClawVortex makes this visual.

The Sub-Agent Canvas

In ClawVortex, sub-agent relationships are represented as nested nodes. The parent agent appears as a container, and sub-agents are nodes inside it. You define spawn conditions by drawing edges from the parent's decision points to sub-agent templates.

Tool Permission Mapping

Each sub-agent node has a visual tool panel where you check which tools it can access. This makes it easy to enforce the principle of least privilege — a billing sub-agent should not have access to the deployment API.

Stress Testing Sub-Agent Flows

ClawVortex's stress tester understands sub-agent boundaries. It simulates scenarios where sub-agents fail, return unexpected results, or attempt to access tools outside their permission set. This catches edge cases that are nearly impossible to find through manual testing.

Best Practices

• Keep sub-agents focused. Each sub-agent should have a single, well-defined responsibility. If a sub-agent needs to do three different things, consider splitting it into three sub-agents.
• Limit tool access. Give each sub-agent only the tools it needs. Over-permissioned sub-agents are a security risk and a source of unexpected behavior.
• Define clear handoff contracts. Specify exactly what information the parent passes to each sub-agent and what format the sub-agent's response should take.
• Plan for failure. Sub-agents can fail or time out. Your parent agent should have fallback behavior for when a sub-agent does not return a useful result.
• Test adversarial inputs. Use ClawVortex's stress tester to simulate prompt injection and other adversarial scenarios across sub-agent boundaries.

Getting Started

Sub-agent orchestration is available in ClawVortex's Pro and Enterprise tiers. If you are on the waitlist, you will get access to sub-agent features as soon as they ship. Join the waitlist to be among the first to build visual sub-agent workflows.