---
schema: 1
type: term
title: '**Subagent**'
description: >-
  A **subagent** is a smaller agent that a main agent spawns to handle a slice
  of work — such as research, code exploration, or parallel knowledge-work tasks
  — running alongside the main agent rather than in its single thread.
canonical: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/subagent-6e865b4ccf9d'
markdown: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/subagent-6e865b4ccf9d.md'
llms: null
parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/llms.txt'
channel: everyinc
updated: '2026-10-23T22:12:35.346Z'
language: null
children: []
---


# \*\*Subagent\*\*

Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/subagent-6e865b4ccf9d

Parent: [Channel index](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/llms.txt)

## Definition

A **subagent** is a smaller agent that a main agent spawns to handle a slice of work — such as research, code exploration, or parallel knowledge-work tasks — running alongside the main agent rather than in its single thread.

In the captured material, **subagents** show up wherever a main agent decides that a task is too big or too parallel to handle alone. The clearest example is **Claude Opus 4.6**, which the Every team observed **parallelizing by default**: it spawns sub-agents for research, code exploration, and even knowledge-work tasks — running email, research, and Notion updates simultaneously. Naveen even saw it re-spawn sub-agents in follow-up turns without being asked, and described the model as **'hungry for context.'** A subagent in this material is an *offshoot worker* the main agent delegates a slice of a job to, then folds results back into the parent's answer. Two concrete effects stand out: - **Research wins**: Opus 4.6's famous one-shot fix of a two-month iOS microphone problem came from research, not raw coding genius — it synthesized a competitor's changelog and GitHub implementations through parallel sub-agents. - **A consistency trade-off**: the same aggressive sub-agent spawning is flagged as something that *lowers Opus's consistency floor* — more parallel activity, more places to drift. The material draws a sharp contrast: **Opus parallelizes by default**, while **Codex only has sub-agents in experimental mode**. That difference is what makes Anthropic's **agent swarms** such a speed lever — Kieran Claassen reported his `/LFG` compound-engineering loop dropped from 20 minutes to 5 minutes with swarms enabled, though he caveats that swarms shine in *implementation* (where the plan and dependency graph are clear) and help less in planning phases that need refinement rather than breadth.  - A **subagent** is a delegated offshoot of a main agent, spawned to run a slice of work in parallel. - **Opus 4.6** spawns them by default — for research, code exploration, even email/Notion tasks — and Naveen called the model **'hungry for context.'** - Subagents powered Opus's one-shot iOS fix by gathering context from multiple sources. - They cut both ways: aggressive spawning lowers Opus's consistency floor. - **Codex's sub-agents are still experimental**; Anthropic's agent swarms took Kieran's `/LFG` loop from 20 minutes to 5.