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Subagent

ai-engineering claude-code agent-design subagent

A fresh agent instance dispatched by a parent agent to execute an isolated task with clean context.

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Definition

A subagent is an AI agent instance spawned by a parent agent to execute a specific task in isolation. Subagents have clean context (no session history), run concurrently, and their failures do not corrupt the parent’s context. The parent dispatches them with a focused prompt and synthesizes their outputs. This is how skills achieve parallelism — multiple subagents can run simultaneously (lint, tests, code review) while the parent continues working.

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Source

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