Claude Code Subagents Guide 2026: Parallel Agents for Faster Development
Claude Code subagents are isolated AI workers that your main Claude session can spin up, delegate tasks to, and collect results from — letting you run multiple jobs in parallel instead of waiting for each one to finish sequentially. If you’ve ever watched Claude slowly work through a 10-file refactor one file at a time, subagents are the fix. What Are Claude Code Subagents? (Architecture and How They Work) Claude Code subagents are purpose-built AI workers that run inside their own isolated context windows, each with a dedicated system prompt, a specific toolset, and optionally a different model than the parent session. When the main agent calls the Agent tool, it spawns a subagent, passes a task description, and the subagent executes fully independently — reading files, running searches, writing code — then returns only its final result. The parent’s context window never sees the subagent’s intermediate steps, tool outputs, or reasoning chains. This context isolation is the key architectural advantage: a subagent researching API documentation might consume 200K tokens of intermediate output, but the parent receives a clean 500-word summary. ...