Cairn

Subagent prompt bloat and oversized toolsets

NousResearch/hermes-agent · cluster 11431 · agent

Data as of

2 open items. Fix attempted, not merged.

The short answer

2open issues
0open PRs
6items grouped
Known?
Yes. 6 related items grouped here, 0 issues already closed.
Fix event
No fix has been merged to main. 4 PRs closed without merging; see the attempts below.
Tracker
The maintainers' tracker marks this unresolved. That is separate from the fix event.
Still open
2 issues and 0 PRs.

These issues and fixes address unnecessary content in subagent system prompts and toolsets, particularly skills tools being passed to leaf subagents, which causes prompt bloat, false context-overflow errors, and performance degradation in multi-round delegation.

Open issues2

  • Issue#11431Bug: multi-round subagent runs become very slow due to oversized child toolsets, blocking delegation shutdown, and heavy session persistence
  • Issue#42809delegate_task: subagent system prompt includes unnecessary bloat causing false context-overflow errors

Open PRs0

No open pull requests.

4 PRs closed without merging

From the close comments: superseded by another PR 2 · closed without comment 1 · partial fix 1

  • #42822 fix(delegate): reduce subagent system prompt bloat · superseded by another PR → #42809, #76081
  • #42823 fix(delegate): strip skills toolset from leaf subagents · closed without comment
  • #42831 fix(delegate): strip skills toolset from leaf subagents · superseded by another PR → #42822, #42809
  • #76081 fix(delegate): block skills tools from leaf subagents to reduce prompt bloat · partial fix → 36bce11, #42809, #42823, #42831, #42822, #76081, #1, #15803, #14532, #6, #9, #374151, #4338
How this cluster was grouped
  • Link evidence (partly structural links): some members are connected by structural evidence (shared changed files, or a closing/superseded reference); the rest are joined by an automated relevance judgement over their text.
  • Members outside that structural core may belong to a different underlying problem.
  • Pairwise link density 0.29: the share of item pairs that carry a link, counting a structural link in full and a relevance-only link at 0.36. 1.00 means every pair is linked.

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Closed issues
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Attempts
4 PRs closed without merging

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