koios/docs/personal/subagents.md

# Personal Subagents

The personal lead agents (Shawn, Nate, Hypatia, Marcus, Watson, Bourdain, David, Cousteau, Garth, Cristiano) delegate certain repeatable tasks to a shared **subagent** — minimal personality, narrow scope, called as a tool. Subagents don't own graph nodes and don't have character bibles.

Subagents are runtime processes defined under `iolaus/agents/` (personal-team variants) or `kottos/agents/` (engineering originals, reused), exposed as MCP tools via StreamableHTTP. The canonical prompt text lives in `prompts/personal/subagents/` — copies in the runtime code should match.

Mikael has a stronger editorial voice than the other subagents (Scandinavian newsroom skepticism, refusal to launder claims from low-credibility outlets) but is still a narrow-scope tool — no graph nodes, no character bible, invoked by leads as a sub-tool.

## Catalog

### research

**Purpose:** Answer a question by querying both the public web and Robert's personal Neo4j memory in parallel, then synthesizing one integrated response.

**Composition:** `fast.parallel` of three sub-agents:
- `web_search` — argos
- `memory_lookup` — neo4j (read-only), scoped to the **full personal-domain schema** (10 agents, all node types)
- `synthesizer` — merges the two reports, flags conflicts, suggests memory updates

**Tools:** argos, neo4j_cypher

**When to delegate:**
- A question where the answer might exist in Robert's personal Neo4j *and* on the public web
- "What do I already know about X, and what's the current public information on it?"
- Travel research that should also check Robert's past trips and journal entries
- Book/film/music recommendations that should consider what he's already engaged with
- Investment or finance questions that should reference his existing accounts and goals
- When the lead wants memory-aware research without burning its own context on parallel queries

**When NOT to delegate:**
- Quick web lookups where memory isn't relevant — use Argos directly
- Pure graph queries where the web isn't needed — query Neo4j directly with read-only Cypher
- Single-domain depth questions where the domain specialist is the right answer (don't delegate "what should I read about Stoicism" to research when Hypatia owns it)

**Prompt:** [prompts/personal/subagents/research.md](../../prompts/personal/subagents/research.md)

**Runtime:** `kottos/agents/research.py` (personal-team variant, copied with tweaks from engineering's research subagent — the memory_lookup sub-agent's prompt is scoped to personal-domain node types instead of engineering's)

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### mikael

**Purpose:** Produce topic-driven, source-verified news briefings. Reads from a curated topic list and applies a strict source policy (preferred sources seeded into queries; avoided sources excluded with `-site:` *and* post-filtered by hostname).

**Composition:** Single `fast.agent` (not a `fast.parallel`). The agent itself does the search → fetch → image lookup → summarize loop.

**Tools:** argos (`search_web`, `fetch_webpage`, `search_images`), time, mnemosyne

**When to delegate:**
- "What's the latest on X?" — current events on a single topic, with sources and timestamps
- Daily / morning briefings across the configured topic list
- Any task where Robert needs *what is currently being reported* (with attribution and recency), not just background knowledge
- Lead agents that need news context for their domain — e.g. Cristiano on a transfer story, David on an arts/culture story, Garth on a markets development — when the question is "what's being reported right now"

**When NOT to delegate:**
- Historical / background questions where the answer doesn't depend on the last 24h — use Argos directly or ask the domain lead
- Topic deep-dives that need analysis, not headlines — the domain lead is the right answer (don't ask Mikael "what should I think about X")
- Anything Robert wants stored — Mikael is read-only and explicitly does not write to Neo4j; the calling lead is responsible for persisting what matters

**Configuration:** Driven by the top-level `news:` block in `iolaus/fastagent.config.yaml` — topics, preferred sources, avoided sources, default lookback window, max items per topic. Edits take effect on Iolaus restart, no code changes needed.

**Source policy:** Mikael will never summarize or cite an avoided source, even if another outlet syndicates the claim. If only an avoided source has a story, the story is "unreported" until a credible outlet picks it up.

**Prompt:** Embedded in [iolaus/agents/mikael.py](https://git.helu.ca/r/iolaus/src/branch/main/agents/mikael.py) (no separate canonical file in `prompts/personal/subagents/` yet — the in-code instruction interpolates the `news:` config block at startup, which is awkward to mirror as static markdown).

**Runtime:** `iolaus/agents/mikael.py` (exposed as the `news` MCP tool on port 24053). Unlike `research`, there is no engineering-team variant — news briefing is a personal-team-only capability.

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## Conventions

**Source of truth:** koios is the master. The prompt text in `prompts/personal/subagents/` is canonical; runtime `.py` files should load from or match these prompts. When iterating, edit koios first and propagate.

**Personality:** Subagents have minimal personality. Their identity is their role — "you are a web search specialist," "you are a memory specialist." No named character. The voice comes from the calling lead, not from the subagent.

**Cross-team reuse:** The `research` subagent exists in three variants — engineering, work, and personal — each with its `memory_lookup` sub-agent's prompt scoped to that team's node types. This is **copy with tweaks** rather than a single shared file. The duplication is cheap; the per-team specificity makes the memory_lookup query more accurate.

**Graph ownership:** Subagents do not own node types and do not write to the graph. The `memory_lookup` sub-agent is explicitly read-only. If a subagent's output suggests Robert's memory should be updated ("the web says X but your notes say Y; you might want to update your notes"), the calling lead agent is responsible for the write — not the subagent.