Subagent

A subagent is a specialized AI agent spawned and directed by a parent agent—called the orchestrator—to handle a specific subtask within a larger workflow. Rather than solving every problem itself, the orchestrator delegates discrete responsibilities to subagents, each of which may have its own tools, system prompts, and defined scope of action. The subagent pattern is a foundational building block of modern multi-agent architectures. While the orchestrator plans, sequences, and aggregates results, subagents execute in parallel or sequentially across specialized domains—running database queries, generating code, analyzing documents, or conducting web research. Once complete, each subagent returns its output to the orchestrator, which synthesizes the results into a final response or action. Subagents can themselves spawn additional subagents, creating hierarchical agent trees capable of tackling enterprise-scale complexity. Frameworks like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex use this pattern to decompose large software engineering tasks into parallel, manageable steps that exceed what a single-context agent could accomplish within its token limits. The clear separation between orchestrator and subagent improves observability, fault isolation, and incremental scaling: a failing subagent can be retried or replaced without restarting the entire workflow, making this pattern essential for production-grade agentic systems.