[RussianCow]

The system prompt and available tools would likely only change for different agent types. So how they're launched probably doesn't matter.

I say this as I don't actually know how Clade Code does this, since it's not open source, but I fail to see why two agents doing the same thing launched at different times would have different tools and system prompts.

[gorkish]

I think you are right and most people here are overthinking it.

If you make a bunch of identical API calls quickly, before the initial request completes its cache write, you will have cache misses.

If you make a single API call to warm the cache, then make a bunch of subsequent identical requests, you will have cache hits.

The optimization for this sort of thing is to deduplicate in-flight requests, but i've seen no evidence that is being done; the better design pattern would be an api or tool call that explicitly launches multiple agents after a shared prompt processing stage