SOURCE: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents.md (accessed 2026-05-28)

Claude Code Subagents — Reference

Subagents are specialized AI assistants that run in their own context window with custom system prompts, specific tool access, and independent permissions. Use one when a task would flood your main conversation with output you won't reference again; the subagent does the work in its own context and returns only a summary.

Subagents help you:

• Preserve context by keeping exploration and implementation out of your main conversation
• Enforce constraints by limiting which tools a subagent can use
• Reuse configurations across projects with user-level subagents
• Control costs by routing tasks to faster, cheaper models like Haiku

Subagents cannot spawn other subagents. For coordinated parallel work with inter-agent messaging, see ./references/agent-teams.md.

Built-in subagents

SOURCE: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents.md § Built-in subagents (accessed 2026-05-28)