Claude Code subagents isolate research, implementation

This is less about “more autonomy” and more about better context hygiene: Anthropic is turning agent orchestration into a first-class workflow primitive for coding.

• –Explore keeps codebase search and analysis read-only, which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to avoid contaminating the main thread with dead-end investigation.
• –Plan acts like a gated research layer during planning, while the general-purpose agent handles the messy multi-step work that needs both reading and editing.
• –Custom Markdown agents make the feature practical, because teams can encode repeatable roles, prompts, and permission boundaries instead of re-explaining them every session.
• –The real upside is composability: smaller, specialized agents can focus on one job well, then hand back a distilled result instead of flooding the parent context.
• –For developers, this pushes Claude Code closer to an operating model for software work, not just a chat UI with tool access.