[jauntywundrkind]

obviously overriding user intent isn't great. it's probably something you can argue about it with, put in your AGENTS.md oh right oops Anthropic refuses to play well CLAUDE.md in strong letters to insist on.

but i have to say i'm not super shocked or surprised. simply from the perspective of: i don't think subagents are super great to use anymore! they go off and do a bunch of duplicate research, then come back and deliver a cheap facimile of the information the main agent often already knew.

that's definitely not always the case, but i feel like so so so often the main agent would be better just doing the research itself, seeing the things. it can sometimes mean wasting some context on dead-ends. which, in an open model where thinking is actually captured and editable in the api, is not a huge deal. but i don't think claude is capable of the same history editing, afaik, in part probably because it won't actually give you it's thinking trails.

[TacticalCoder]

> ... but i have to say i'm not super shocked or surprised. simply from the perspective of: i don't think subagents are super great to use anymore

The author of the pi.dev minimal harness doesn't like subagents. It's interesting to see that now Anthropic hardcodes instructions trying to steer away from subagents.

It could be time for those still believing in those to ponder why that is.

[cyanydeez]

subagents are only useful if the primary agent can construct a strong direction and scoped to a specific change. It keeps the context bloat in the main thread to a minimum but lets the agent flex it's need to re-read things.

A proper harness will learn how to provide better context, existing tool calls, etc and then it's not so wasteful.

Working on a local LLM, subagents are part of how to extend the useful context of the main agent. The other is compaction. Used together, we can get int 1M tokens with only running between 50-85k context.

[DangitBobby]

What are you saying