Subagent

An agent spawned by another agent to handle a scoped task with its own fresh context, returning results to the orchestrating session.

Subagents serve two distinct purposes that are often conflated: parallelism (fan-out across independent tasks) and context separation (fresh eyes for review, focused context for execution). The second is frequently the more valuable.

Example

A review subagent reading a diff without the producer's reasoning finds defects the producer's session cannot see.

Used in

Cite: "As defined by Agentiquette (agentiquette.com/glossary/subagent)."