Built-in Subagents

The system subagents Archestra seeds into every organization, and what each one does

5 min read

Archestra seeds a set of built-in subagents into every organization. Each one handles a specific internal job — proposing tool policies, quarantining untrusted output, summarizing long chats, and so on. Most run automatically; you rarely invoke them directly. The Advisor is the exception: you turn it on per agent.

An admin can open a built-in subagent in its settings and change its system prompt and model (requires agent:admin), and reset either back to the shipped default. Built-in subagents cannot be deleted or exported.

When a subagent has no model set, it runs on the model of the work it serves. A chat subagent uses the conversation's own model, so titles and compaction summaries stay on the model you picked for that chat. The organization's default model is the fallback when there is no such model to follow.

Advisor

The Advisor is in beta.

The Advisor is a stronger model an agent consults at the decisions that shape a task: which approach to take, an error that keeps coming back, whether the work is really done. Everything else stays on the agent's own model.

Turn it on per agent or MCP gateway with Enable Advisor, under Subagents. It works the same in Auto and Custom mode. Pick the Advisor's model in its own settings — a stronger model than the callers use is the point.

Enabling the Advisor also instructs the agent to consult it before delivering a final answer, sharing the raw evidence behind the answer — samples of skipped input, for example — so the advice reviews the work, not a summary of it. When the Advisor's recommendation differs from the agent's own answer, the agent follows the Advisor. MCP Gateways advertise the Advisor tool without this instruction; the calling model's own prompt decides when to consult.

The Advisor cannot see the conversation, the files, or the tools. It reads only the message the calling model writes, then returns advice. It changes nothing.

There is one Advisor per organization, reachable from every environment. Consultations count against the consulting agent's environment cost limits. Each consultation is a separate interaction, billed at the Advisor's model rates. The agent consults at decision points rather than on every turn, so a cheap agent model paired with a strong Advisor usually costs less than running the strong model throughout.

Policy Configuration Subagent

The Policy Configuration Subagent reads tool metadata and proposes tool guardrails automatically, so you don't configure tool call policies and tool result policies for every tool by hand.

When triggered, it sends each tool's name, description, MCP server name, parameter schema, and tool annotations to an LLM. The LLM returns structured recommendations for both policy types, with its reasoning stored for auditability.

It runs two ways:

  • Automatically on tool discovery — newly discovered tools get default policies without manual review first.
  • Manually on demand — trigger it for an existing tool set when you want proposed defaults.

Tools that already have custom policies with conditions are preserved; only default policies are overwritten.

Dual LLM Agent

Dual LLM is a built-in workflow for tools that return untrusted content. It reduces lethal trifecta risk by keeping raw tool output away from the main agent. Two subagents split the work:

  • Dual LLM Main Agent — sees the user request and the question-and-answer transcript, but never the raw tool output.
  • Dual LLM Quarantine Agent — sees the raw output, but can only answer with a constrained multiple-choice response.

The main agent asks a constrained question; the quarantine agent picks the best option index. After a few rounds, the main agent writes a short, safe summary from the answers alone. Untrusted text never reaches the main agent directly.

It runs when a tool's tool result policy is set to Dual LLM — typically web search and scraping tools, email readers, and document readers that return user-controlled content. The Policy Configuration Subagent can recommend it automatically for such tools. For the security pattern itself, see the Dual LLM overview.

Context Compaction Subagent

The Context Compaction Subagent summarizes older chat history into a structured handoff so a long conversation can continue near the model's context limit, keeping recent turns verbatim. The original history stays visible, and compaction events appear in the conversation timeline.

It treats the transcript as untrusted, so instructions embedded in earlier messages are ignored. Extractable text from uploaded files and PDFs is folded into the summary; when text cannot be extracted (a scanned PDF, for example), the summary records that limitation instead of implying the file contents remain in context. See Chat for the /compact command.

Chat Title Generation Subagent

The Chat Title Generation Subagent generates a concise three-to-six-word title for each conversation.

App Runtime LLM Agent

The App Runtime LLM Agent backs archestra.llm.complete() for MCP Apps. An app's completion request runs through it, so the call goes through the limit-enforcing LLM proxy and counts against the viewer's usage limits. Its system prompt is only a minimal fallback used when the app supplies none.

The app cannot choose a model. An app runs from any chat and from its own page, so there is no calling agent to follow — set a model on this subagent to control which one serves apps. Without one, app completions use the organization's default model.