Super-agent Design: Router/Worker Split for Always-On Agents
The DeepSeek Harness team applies classic systems ideas to agent architecture. A long-lived Router session handles all human interaction and task dispatch but never executes work; context-isolated Workers run tasks concurrently and subscribe directly to event Threads, so follow-up events bypass the Router. Environment events (Triggers) are filtered by code fast paths before any model call, the context window is treated as a cache with Inline/Spill plus multi-hop Chain of Recall, and an external Watchdog session checks whether Workers are actually making progress. In a synthetic ablation, the two-level design finished tasks at p50 12.4 / p95 15.7 minutes versus 20.4/29.5 for a single session with a subagent tool; removing pass-through raised Router cache-read tokens 37%. The authors flag synthetic workloads and unresolved cloud/endpoint security.