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How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

zachwills.net

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Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#61

Post by wahnfrieden »

zarzavat wrote: post #11
CuriouslyC wrote: post #5

As someone who's built a project in this space, this is incredibly unreliable. Subagents don't get a full system prompt (including stuff like CLAUDE.md directions) so they are flying very blind in your projects, and as such will tend to get derailed by their lack of knowledge of a project and veer into mock solutions and "let me just make a simpler solution that demonstrates X." I advise people to only use subagents…

> Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly. Very much this. I tried to get Claude to move some code from one file to another. Some of the code went missing . Some of it was modified along the way. Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!…

Codex’s model is much better at actually reading large volumes of code which improves its results compared with CC

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#62

Post by troupo »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25
troupo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't log/write/keep track of success over time. How do you define success of a model's run?

Lots of ways. You could do binary thumbs up/down. You could do a feedback session. You could look at signals like "acceptance rate" (for a pr?) or "how many feedback messages did the user send in this session", and so on. My point was more on tracking these signals over time. And using them to improve the client, not just the model (most model providers probably track this already).

Ah. Yes!

My somewhat terse/bitter question was because yesterday Claude would continue claim to have created a "production-ready" solution which was completely entirely wrong.

I would've loved to have the feedback loop you describe

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#63

Post by redhale »

lucraft wrote: post #33
sixhobbits wrote: post #26

I often see people making these sub agents modelled on roles like product manager, back end developer, etc. I spent a few hours trying stuff like this and the results were pretty bad compared to just using CC with no agent specific instructions. Maybe I needed to push through and find a combination that works but I don't find this article convincing as the author basically says "it works" without showing examples or…

Right - don’t make subagents for the different roles, make them to manage context for token heavy tasks. A backend developer subagent is going to do the job ok, but then the supervisor agent will be missing useful context about what’s been done and will go off the rails. The ideal sub agent is one that can take a simple question, use up massive amounts of tokens answering it, and then return a simple answer, dropping…

This!

Subagents open all the new metaphorical tabs to get to some answer, then close those tabs so the main agent can proceed with the main task.

Excellent article on this pattern: https://jxnl.co/writing/2025/08/29/context-engineering-slash...

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#64

Post by shaisjsh »

zarzavat wrote: post #14
ehnto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code you didn't write is an even bigger liability, because if the AI gets off track and you can't guide it back, you may have to spend the time to learn it's code and fix the bugs. It's no different to inheriting a legacy application though. As well, from the perspective of a product owner, it's not a new risk.

Claude is a junior. The more you work with it, the more you get a feel for which tasks it will ace unsupervised (some subset of grunt work) and which tasks to not even bother using it for. I don't trust Claude to write reams of code that I can't maintain except when that code is embarrassingly testable, i.e it has an external source of truth.

> some subset of grunt work

What tasks are these? I don’t doubt they’re out there, but if I know the exact code that needs to be generated typing speed is not a bottle neck.

For me the slow part is determining what to write. And while AI helps with that (search, brainstorm, etc) by the time I know what to write trying to get the AI to enter those lines is often just a slow down. Much like writing up a ticket for a junior, I could write the code faster than I could write the English language rules describing how to write that code.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#65

Post by weird-eye-issue »

faangguyindia wrote: post #56
skimojoe wrote: post #55

I am sceptical if these persona based agents really make that much of a difference, and more "appear" to make a difference because of their talk style. Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is goin…

You don't need subagent, I shared this on ClaudeCode sub as well https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 Subagents do not work well for coding at all

Subagents are literally built into Claude Code via a built-in tool where it can recursively call itself

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#66

Post by misiti3780 »

I was bored yesterday and I tried to vibe code a simple react app yesterday using claude code and it was basically useless. It created a good shell of a code initially, but after 10 minutes I basically had to take over (It would be a feature, then regress the previous.)

Am I the only one convinced that all of the hype around coding agents like codex and claude is 85% BS ?

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#67

Post by faangguyindia »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #65
faangguyindia wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need subagent, I shared this on ClaudeCode sub as well https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78 Subagents do not work well for coding at all

Subagents are literally built into Claude Code via a built-in tool where it can recursively call itself

Yes I know, but subagent suffer from context amnesia during context handouts which is why this subagent use is flawed for purpose of coding product features. I've been using these tools a lot and installed every ai agent out there i could find.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#68

Post by dpkirchner »

ako wrote: post #24
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One key insight I have from having worked on this from the early stages of LLMs (before chatgpt came out) is that the current crop of LLM clients or "agentic clients" don't log/write/keep track of success over time. It's more of a "shoot and forget" environment right now, and that's why a lot of people are getting vastly different results. Hell, even week to week on the same tasks you get different results (see the r…

I’ve experimented with feature chats, so start a new chat for every change, just like a feature branch. At the end of a chat I’ll have it summarize the the feature chat and save it as a markdown document in the project, so the knowledge is still available for next chats. Seems to work well. You can also ask the llm at the end of a feature chat to prepare a prompt to start the next feature chat so it can determine wha…

I ask the bot to come up with a list of "don't dos"/lessons learned based on what went right or required lots of edits. Then I have it merge them in to an ongoing list. It works OK.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#69

Post by brookst »

zarzavat wrote: post #11
CuriouslyC wrote: post #5

As someone who's built a project in this space, this is incredibly unreliable. Subagents don't get a full system prompt (including stuff like CLAUDE.md directions) so they are flying very blind in your projects, and as such will tend to get derailed by their lack of knowledge of a project and veer into mock solutions and "let me just make a simpler solution that demonstrates X." I advise people to only use subagents…

> Their ability to refactor a codebase goes in the toilet pretty quickly. Very much this. I tried to get Claude to move some code from one file to another. Some of the code went missing . Some of it was modified along the way. Humans have strategies for refactoring, e.g. "I'm going to start from the top of the file and Cut code that needs to be moved and Paste it in the new location". LLM don't have a clipboard (yet!…

Claude’s utility really drops when any task requires a working set larger than the context window.

On the one hand, it’s kind or irritating when it goes great-great-great-fail.

On the other hand, it really enforces the best practices of small classes, small files, separation of concerns. If each unit is small enough it does great.

Unfortunately, it’s also fairly verbose and not great at recognizing that it is writing the same code over and over again, so I often find some basic file has exploded to 3000 lines, and a simple “identity repeated logic and move to functions” prompt shrinks it to 500 lines.

Re: How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

#70

Post by CuriouslyC »

stingraycharles wrote: post #46
CuriouslyC wrote: post #5

As someone who's built a project in this space, this is incredibly unreliable. Subagents don't get a full system prompt (including stuff like CLAUDE.md directions) so they are flying very blind in your projects, and as such will tend to get derailed by their lack of knowledge of a project and veer into mock solutions and "let me just make a simpler solution that demonstrates X." I advise people to only use subagents…

It was my understanding that the subagents have the same system prompt. How do you know that they don’t follow CLAUDE.md directions? I’ve been using subagents since they were introduced and it has been a great way to manage context size / pollution.

A few youtubers have done deep dives on this, monitoring claude traffic through a proxy. Subagents don't get the system prompt or anything else, they get their subagent prompt and whatever handoff the main agent gives them.

I was on the subagent hype train myself for a while but as my codebases have scaled (I have a couple of codebases up to almost 400k now) subagents have become a lot more error prone and now I cringe when I see them for anything challenging and immediately escape out. They seem to work great with more greenfield projects though.

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