Claude Code guide maps subagent workflows

The interesting part here is not a shiny new feature but a clearer operating model for AI-assisted development. Claude Code’s subagents turn prompt juggling into something closer to lightweight workflow design.

• –Anthropic’s docs position subagents as specialized assistants with their own context window, prompt, tool access, and permissions, which makes them useful for keeping research and implementation from polluting the main thread
• –The built-in Explore and Plan agents show Claude Code is pushing toward role-based delegation, not just a single omniscient coding copilot
• –The guidance to choose subagents for parallelizable or high-context tasks is especially relevant for bigger repos, where context discipline matters as much as model quality
• –Because subagents can be constrained to read-only or narrower tool sets, they also act as a safety and cost-control layer, not just a productivity trick
• –For developers, this is best understood as workflow literacy: the gain comes from knowing when to split work across agents, not from invoking more agents by default