castiel

Sub-agents & background work ​

Long-running work shouldn't block the chat. castiel has two mechanisms for it. Sub-agents for delegating work or parrallelism, and background processes for running commands. Plus a looper that keeps a session moving while you are away.

Sub-agents ​

The main agent can delegate narrow mechanical work. Recon, scanning, OSINT runs, document formatting... to a sub-agent that runs its own model in the background and returns a result. The relevant tools are sub_agent, agent_list, agent_read and agent_kill.

Sub-agent models are configured in Settings → Sub-agents and never inherit the chat model; each role stays idle until you pick one:

  • Worker: this is the main subagent that the orchestrator agent calls. The orchestrator can delegate some serious scans/jobs to this agent. Prefer to use a smart and fast model for this one.
  • Kali dispatcher — starts the tools you pick in the Kali dialog and terminates. It only ever gets the Kali-launch toolset, no raw shell. Prefer a small and fast model for this one.
  • Looper — see below.

Finished and running sub-agents appear in the Agents tab of the bottom panel, with each run's task, live activity phase and final summary.

Background processes ​

Both you and the agent can start long-running processes, an nmap scan, a listener, a brute-force run... and keep chatting while they run. The agent uses bg_start, bg_list, bg_read, bg_send and bg_kill to start them, check on them periodically and feed or terminate them; you can launch your own process from the Processes tab of the bottom panel and let castiel track progress and report results back to the workspace.

The looper ​

The Loop button next to the composer keeps a session working while you are away: when the orchestrator agent goes idle, the looper reads the workspace, last orchestrator message and it's own last message, thinks about a next attack plan, and sends the instruction itself, until you stop it. Its budgets (how far it may run on its own) are part of the Limits settings.