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Claude Code1 min read

Claude Code subagents — what they are and when to use one.

Subagents let you delegate well-scoped work to a fresh context. Here's the pattern.

Haojun See
Haojun See

Founder & Director, On The Ground

Updated 6 June 2026

Overview

Claude Code supports subagents — child agents you can spawn for specific tasks. They run with their own context window and return a summarised result. For complex work, they keep your main conversation clean.

When a subagent helps

• Heavy research with lots of source-reading that would clutter your main conversation. • Code review of a large diff before merging. • Generating boilerplate for multiple similar files at once.

When it doesn't

Quick edits. The subagent overhead isn't worth it for a 2-line change. Iterative work where you want full visibility into every step.

Briefing a subagent well

Subagents don't see your main conversation. The prompt must be self-contained: include file paths, what to check, what success looks like, what to report.

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