Claude Code Subagents Explained: How to Delegate Noisy Tasks and Save Context

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Claude Code subagents are isolated reasoning agents with their own context windows, designed to handle exploratory or high-output tasks without cluttering the main conversation session. Unlike Skills, which load instructions directly into the main agent, subagents run separately and return only a summary, keeping intermediate noise out of the primary context. Each subagent operates with a restricted tool allowlist and has no visibility into other subagents' work, making them unsuitable for tightly dependent sequential tasks. They are best used for codebase exploration, automated test runs, security reviews, and multi-step research where raw intermediate output would otherwise overwhelm the main session. Understanding when to use subagents versus Skills or MCP servers is key to avoiding added latency with no practical benefit.

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