lean-brief-pointer-not-payload
Lean Brief — Pass a Pointer, Not a Payload
Section titled “Lean Brief — Pass a Pointer, Not a Payload”A sub-agent brief (Agent / Task / TeamCreate / forked skill) carries the task, the decisive constraints, and paths — not bulk content. File bodies, whole plan phases, a prior agent’s report, transcript excerpts, command output: name the path, let the receiver Read it. A brief past ~2K tokens is almost certainly carrying payload the receiver could fetch itself.
Paste verbatim anyway (small, must not drift in transit): the integration contract / design-intent brief, exact identifiers (paths, SHAs, flags, enum values, field names + casing), and the one constraint the agent would otherwise have to guess.
Why: the brief is billed into the child’s window before it does any work, and a pasted copy goes stale the moment the file changes — a path cannot.
Full rationale, worked example, plan-phase corollary: skills/t1k-team/references/lean-brief-pointer-not-payload.md.