Running three agents via Codex: Main (GTD, crons, morning ritual, routing), Mentor (advice, journaling), and Couples (separate WhatsApp group). Main is the only entry point; Mentor has no direct channel.

The problem

Main is dropping balls: losing list items, mis-routing, marking wrong tasks done. Mentor is worse: same model, but answers routed through it come out dramatically thinner than asking directly.

Concrete example from this morning: I described feeling wired and restless, couldn't meditate, wanted to be present with my partner. Mentor gave me two lines of surface coaching. Same prompt to raw ChatGPT returned a proper diagnosis (late caffeine, blocked deep sleep, dopamine spike) plus a 5-step protocol. The Mentor reply isn't wrong, it's just shallow when I needed a real answer.

The core question

Is this an architecture problem (Main overloaded, context polluted, routing adding noise) or a prompt and orchestration problem that splitting agents won't fix?

Genuinely don't know. One direction I'm considering: make Main a thin stateless router and give each specialist a tighter prompt and narrower tool surface. But I'm not sold on it yet; it might just be that my prompts are weak.

Questions

1. Anyone running router + specialists in OpenClaw? Pitfalls to watch for (double-hop latency, context bleed, tool-call failures across agents)?
2. How do you handle shared state across specialists? E.g. an advice agent that needs open GTD next-actions, or a health agent that needs calendar context.
3. Anyone seeing quality drops routing through Codex vs. hitting the model directly? Same model, same prompt, noticeably worse output through the framework.
4. For advice-only agents, is framework overhead actually costing answer quality, or is it almost always a prompt problem?

Happy to share my Main system prompt in the comments.