Glossary Entry

Subagent

A helper agent that a main agent launches with its own context window and instructions to do a bounded piece of work, returning only a summary or a result.

LLMs Architecture

Also called: subagents, sub-agent, sub-agents

Seed source: Claude Code documentation

The main value of a subagent is protecting the parent’s context. A search that reads dozens of files, or an investigation that produces long logs, can run in the subagent’s window, and the parent receives a few hundred or a few thousand tokens of conclusions instead of the raw material.

Subagents work best on tasks that need little shared context, such as searching, reading, and independent review. Giving several subagents overlapping write access to the same code tends to produce inconsistent results, because each makes its own implicit decisions without seeing the others’.