subagent
A subagent is an AI agent that carries out a task delegated by a coordinating agent and reports back.
A subagent is an AI agent that handles a task delegated by a coordinating agent and returns its findings. The coordinating agent manages the overall work, while subagents can operate within separate assigned scopes, including in parallel.
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Articles covering this entry
For software engineering, Anthropic recommends running it as a sub-agent, a helper that takes small tasks handed down by a larger model, alongside Sonnet 5.5 or…
A common fix is a supervisor agent that hands pieces of work to sub-agents, helper agents that each take one subtask, and then summarizes their findings.
Divide the work: subagents, handoffs and hooks
Turning on subagents lets the main agent hand pieces of a complex job to specialized helper agents.
Even people who try many agents can realistically manage only about three directly, leaving the rest of the work to sub-agents running underneath.
In that pattern, a sub-agent—a separate agent branch assigned a smaller task—checks whether the work meets completion criteria and returns quiz questions for th…
Coding agents 93 subagents
Codex maintained detailed plans and decisions in its scratchpad and frequently delegated work to parallel subagents.
Of 236 agent errors, 225 involved a concurrent subagent limit reached during nested delegation.