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--- name: using-clink description: The entry point for delegating to another AI CLI agent through PAL's clink tool. Decides which of the four clink skills you actually want before you spend a call — executing a scoped subtask, convening a panel for judgment, hunting a bug across agents, or deciding who may do the work at all. Reach for it whenever you are about to delegate, whenever you are choosing between a subagent and a panel, and whenever a delegation came back wrong and you are not sure the routing was right. Triggers include "delegate this", "ask the other AIs", "get a second opinion", "run this in parallel", "which model should review this". --- # Using Clink **Pick the instrument before you spend a call.** Each skill below carries its own rules — the model ladder, the provenance rule, the verify-everything discipline. This file only decides which one you are in. ## The routing decision | You want | Skill | |---|---| | A scoped subtask **executed** and handed back done — an implementation, a bulk transform, a focused lookup, a first draft | **`clink-subagents`** | | **Judgment** — which design wins, what is wrong with this plan, is this code right | **`clink-brainstorm`** | | To find out **why something is broken**, using more than one agent | **`clink-debug`** | | To decide **who may do it at all**, and to pick the model from measured scores rather than memory | **`clink-masteragent`** | **`clink-masteragent` is a precondition, not a fourth option.** Read it before any of the other three; it owns what you may never hand out, and picking a model from recollection instead of the score table is a documented way this goes wrong. ## Work versus judgment is the whole decision It is the one that gets made backwards, and it is expensive in both directions: - **A panel convened for a question one worker could answer** burns several lanes to produce an opinion where a fact was wanted. - **A worker sent to produce judgment** returns a confident answer nobody checked — and if it is a bug hypothesis, `clink-debug` exists precisely because the wrong seat makes a wrong cause harder to reopen. Ask what you will have when it returns: **finished work, or a position to weigh.** That answers it. ## Before you delegate at all Three things decide whether a delegation is worth making, and all three are in `clink-subagents` — read them there rather than from memory: - **Can you verify the result?** If not, do not delegate it. - **Is it self-contained?** The agent has zero context from your conversation. - **Is it worth the latency?** A read-heavy call against a real repo runs in minutes, not seconds. ## When clink is the wrong tool If the work is small enough that you would finish it before a call bootstraps, do it yourself. If it needs your full session context or your taste, keep it. Delegation is for offloading effort and running independent chunks in parallel — never for avoiding the thinking.