[lwansbrough]

In theory. But in practice, in my experience, sub-agents increase cost.

Sub-agent tasks often have overlapping context after the point of dispatch. Example: you tell agent 1 to explore folder A and agent 2 to explore folder B, if they have the same structure a single agent might be able to discover what it's looking for faster in serial mode vs. parallel. And if not faster, likely with fewer tokens.

And as the orchestrator context grows, it also loses out on capturing the nuance from some of the sub-agent context. In theory they pass some of that back, but realistically things get missed, and you can't apply learnings to parallel runs like you can in series.

The latest frontier models are very good at taking the knowledge they've acquired during a session and applying it forward. Sub-agents make more sense in cases where the agent is dumb to begin with and can't make use of the context it learns from serial execution.