I’ve been using subagents since they were introduced and it has been a great way to manage context size / pollution.
I’ve been using subagents since they were introduced and it has been a great way to manage context size / pollution.
I was on the subagent hype train myself for a while but as my codebases have scaled (I have a couple of codebases up to almost 400k now) subagents have become a lot more error prone and now I cringe when I see them for anything challenging and immediately escape out. They seem to work great with more greenfield projects though.
This should not be possible if they don't have CLAUDE.md in their context.
My main agent prompt always has a complete ban on the main agent doing any work themselves. All work is done by subagents which they coordinate.
I've been doing this for 2-3 months now on projects upwards of 200k lines and the results have been incredible.
I'm very confused how so many of us can have such completely different experiences with these tools.
On the Claude Code Reddit communities there’s basically a constant outrage about CC’s performance over the past few months, it seems different people have vastly different experiences with these tools.
There appears to be a lot of anecdotal evidence everywhere, and not enough hard facts. Anthropic’s lack of transparency how everything works and interacts is at least a factor in this.