The prompt tells the Steward to state its choice on a DELEGATE line and
to explain itself on REASON, COMPLEXITY and CONTEXT lines. Extraction
ignored that structure and substring-matched capability domains across
the entire response, so ordinary English in the explanation selected
agents: "description" contains the housekeeper domain "script",
"discover" contains "cover", "acknowledge" contains "knowledge" and
"know", "economy" contains the biographer domain "my".
Every one of those was a real delegation. A spurious librarian is a
multi-second web call on a query that asked for arithmetic.
It also made prose length a routing input, which would have quietly
corrupted the thinking benchmark this was found during: anything that
shortened the Steward's output reduces accidental substring hits and so
reads as improved routing.
Resolution is now layered, most explicit first — a DELEGATE line opening
with a capability name, then a capability named anywhere on that line,
then a domain on that line. With no DELEGATE line at all the response is
matched on capability names only, never domains, so the conversational
path still answers with no capabilities. Matching is whole-word
throughout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
jpmschweitzerandClaude
a90536314e