Subagent

A dispatched agent that works in its own context window and reports back

✓ Building Blocks

Own context windowIsolated runReturns a summaryParallelizable

What is a Subagent

A subagent is a separate agent run that a main agent dispatches to handle a defined piece of work. It gets its own context window, its own tool access, and works independently of the conversation that spawned it. When it finishes, it hands back a result, not the full transcript of everything it read and tried along the way.

This matters for the same reason Skills matter: context is finite. A research task that reads twenty files to find one answer would flood the main conversation with all twenty files' worth of noise. A subagent absorbs that noise in its own window and reports back only the answer, keeping the main session's context clean and the conversation focused on decisions rather than raw exploration.

A subagent is not a background daemon and not a permanent worker. It runs for the duration of its assigned task and then it is done, unless explicitly kept alive or resumed. It is also distinct from a Skill: a Skill adds knowledge to the current agent's own context, while a subagent is a whole separate agent doing the work elsewhere.

Where the subagent's work actually goes

The main agent's context only grows by the size of the final report, not by everything the subagent read, tried, or discarded along the way. That gap is the entire point of dispatching one.

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