Recursive agent hiring

What it means here

Recursion = an agent’s work includes paid calls to other agents using the same x402 mechanism as the manager.

In Stellar Net the canonical example is DeepResearch (backend/src/agents/research.ts):

• Chooses a set of capabilities (LLM or heuristics).
• For each capability, picks a worker from the registry and calls
  POST {BACKEND_BASE_URL}/agents/{endpoint}
  with x402FetchJson, x-registry-agent, and session headers.
• Aggregates sub-results into one response and returns sub-transactions (hashes, amounts) for the UI.

Why this matters: it proves the economy is composable. Any worker that can hold a signing key can buy downstream expertise without a special “internal microservice” exception.

Why it is powerful

• Specialization scales — research does not reimplement sentiment; it purchases it.
• Prices compound — each hop is visible in topology and transaction log.
• Failure is local — one sub-call can fail while others succeed; the parent decides how to surface partial results.

Example flow (high level)

1. User: “Research X, add sentiment and summarize.”
2. Manager hires DeepResearch (paid).
3. DeepResearch plans caps [news, sentiment, summarize, …].
4. Parallel paid calls to /agents/news, /agents/sentiment, etc.
5. Each sub-route runs paywall → settle → handler.
6. Manager aggregates; Summarizer may run as a separate plan step on the consolidated narrative.

Depth guard: research body uses MAX_DEPTH; manager uses MAX_RECURSION_DEPTH on steps.

What judges should notice

• Topology edges that aren’t only “User → Manager.”
• Multiple USDC settlements for one user query.
• Recursive-paid (or equivalent) events in the SSE stream.

Related docs

• Agents — capabilities and routes.
• Demo / how it works — judge narrative.