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Comment by prodigycorp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a good representative for claude code because I'm primarily a codex user now, but I know that if codex had subagents it would be at least twice as productive. Time spent is an important aspect of performance so yup, the complexity improved performance.

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Not necessarily true. Subagents allow for parallelization but they can decrease accuracy dramatically if you're not careful because there are often dependencies between tasks and swapping context windows with a summary is extremely lossy.

For the longest time, Claude Code itself didnt really use subagents much by default, other than supporting them as a feature eager users could configure. (Source is reverse engineering we did on Claude code using the fantastic CC tracing tool Simon Willison wrote about once. This is also no longer true on latest versions that have e.g. an Explore subagent that is actively used.)

You’re right that subagents were more likely to cause issues than be helpful. But, when properly understood, lead to so much time saved through parallelization for tasks that warranted it.

I was having codex organize my tv/movie library the other day by having it generate. most of the files were not properly labeled. I had codex generate transcripts, manually search the movie db to find descriptions of show episodes, and match the show descriptions against the transcripts to figure out which episode/season the show belonged to.

Claude Code could have parallelized those manual checks and finished that task at 8x the speed.

Are subagents a fundamental change, or just acting as inner loops to the agentic loop similar to the one in the article?

Subagents, in my understanding, are just a tool call from the perspective of the parent.

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