Custom Agent Review

Use this reference when Custom Agents, subagents, agent profiles, specialist roles, or delegated-work quality are in scope. Inventory answers how many Agents are configured; this review asks whether each Agent can be selected, bounded, and trusted for its intended role.

Best-Practice Summary

The common contract across Qoder, Codex, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot is:

• give each Agent one focused specialist role rather than a broad duplicate of the main Agent;
• write a specific description because automatic delegation depends on it;
• make the system prompt state scope, expected output, and important limits;
• grant only the tools, Skills, and MCP access needed for that role;
• use isolated context for bounded exploration, tests, triage, or independent review, while the main Agent owns synthesis and the final decision;
• keep project Agents versioned with the repository and keep user Agents for genuinely reusable personal roles.

Qoder requires name and description, supports tools, model, skills, and mcpServers, and uses the description for automatic selection. Codex recommends subagents for bounded exploration, tests, and triage so the main thread stays focused. Claude Code requires name and description, recommends focused prompts and limited tools, and treats omitted tools as inherited access. GitHub Copilot requires description, uses the Markdown body as the prompt, and enables all available built-in and MCP tools when tools is omitted.

Official grounding:

• Qoder Custom Agent: https://docs.qoder.com/extensions/subagent
• OpenAI Codex best practices: https://developers.openai.com/codex/learn/best-practices
• Claude Code subagents: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents
• GitHub Copilot custom-agent configuration: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/custom-agents-configuration

Evidence Ladder

• Configured: an Agent profile exists in a supported project, user, or plugin location.
• Valid: required metadata and a non-empty prompt parse successfully.
• Bounded: the role, output, and tool/permission boundary are explicit.
• Observed: a bounded session shows the Agent was invoked.
• Effective: the Agent returned a relevant result that the main task used or independently verified.

Presence, count, or a plausible name never proves delegation or effectiveness.

Deterministic Checks

The static evaluator may create findings for:

• missing or malformed frontmatter;
• missing required name for Qoder/Claude-style profiles;
• invalid lowercase/hyphen identifiers where the provider requires them;
• a declared name that drifts from the invocable filename;
• missing or very short descriptions that cannot route a task reliably;
• an empty or extremely short system prompt;
• a prompt above the provider-safe 30,000-character ceiling;
• missing local Markdown references;
• explicit read-only or review-only scope paired with Edit/Write tools;
• omitted or wildcard tool declarations, reported as an unbounded-access advisory rather than a universal failure.

Opaque semantic similarity must not create a duplicate-role finding. A project Agent shadowing a user or plugin Agent is not automatically a defect; report the effective precedence only when the provider contract proves it.

Count And Pressure

Always report the configured Agent count and source scopes. Count alone is unrated: official providers do not publish a universal maximum, and zero Custom Agents is valid when there is no repeated specialist role. Add a pressure finding only when concrete evidence exists, such as exact name collisions, unbounded tool inheritance, repeated unused routing, or overlapping observed delegation.

Reader Summary

Keep the visible summary to one sentence:

Custom Agents score 86 (B); 3 configured, with one profile missing a clear tool boundary.

When scoring evidence is unavailable:

3 Custom Agents are configured, but their profile content was not reviewed.

The summary names count, score when supported, and the most important bounded problem. Detailed checks remain ordinary findings with source paths and a focused repair prompt.

Review Result

Report:

• configured count and Project / Global / Plugin scopes;
• score, grade, risk, confidence, and static/observed evidence state;
• prompt and tool-boundary metrics without embedding prompt content;
• at most one compact surface summary;
• grouped findings for repair-worthy profile problems.

Do not expose raw system prompts, secrets, environment values, session transcripts, or absolute user-home paths in the durable report.