Domain 1Cowork Foundations & Agentic Architecture
Sub-Agent
TL;DR
A temporary parallel worker that Claude creates to handle a piece of a larger task simultaneously.
Definition
A temporary parallel worker that Claude creates to handle a piece of a larger task simultaneously. Instead of processing 20 files one at a time, Claude can spin up multiple sub-agents that each handle a batch concurrently. Tasks that took 30 minutes in early testing now complete in 4-5 minutes.
Exam Context
Know that sub-agents trigger automatically from natural language ("for each one", "analyse all"), that they consume more tokens (not fewer) due to separate reasoning streams, and that they cannot communicate with each other mid-process.