Multi-agent systems · Claude Code subagents
Open-source "AI agencies" ship a roster of specialist subagents — engineering, QA, design, marketing, ops — that drop straight into a coding tool like Claude Code. Under the hype is a real architecture pattern: specialists with isolated context, coordinated by one orchestrator. Grow the org below and watch the numbers.
Drag to rotate · top node = orchestrator
Isolation on: each specialist sees only its own brief. Turn it off to watch shared context balloon.
A subagent is basically a markdown file: a name, a scoped role ("you are the database migration reviewer"), allowed tools, and conventions. Narrow instructions measurably beat one 5,000-word do-everything prompt, because the model isn't juggling sixteen jobs at once.
Each specialist runs in its own context window and returns only a summary. The orchestrator never drowns in raw file dumps, and one agent's confusion can't contaminate another's reasoning — the same reason companies have departments, not one inbox.
Independent tasks — write tests, draft docs, audit dependencies — fan out to run simultaneously. Wall-clock time approaches the longest single task instead of the sum of all tasks.
The honest caveat: more agents is not automatically better. Every delegation hop loses information ("telephone game"), costs tokens, and adds failure surface. Research on multi-agent framework failures finds most breakdowns are coordination problems, not model problems. A 16-division agency is a library of available specialists — a good orchestrator activates two or three per task, not all fifty.
| Stage | Agent | Context it carries | Returns to orchestrator |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Plan | architect | Ticket + repo map (~12k tokens) | 5-step plan, files to touch (~600 tokens) |
| 2. Build | coder | Plan + only the 4 relevant files (~18k tokens) | Diff + rationale (~1.2k tokens) |
| 3. Verify | reviewer | Diff + tests + style guide (~10k tokens) | Pass/fail + 3 findings (~400 tokens) |
| Orchestrator total | Peak ~20k tokens at any moment | vs. ~45k+ for one monolithic thread | |
"An entire AI agency you drop into Claude Code" sounds like magic, but the deliverable is mundane and genuinely useful: a curated folder of subagent definitions plus an installer that copies them into your tool's agent directory. The value isn't secret intelligence — it's that someone already wrote sixteen divisions' worth of tight role prompts so you don't start from a blank page. Evaluate any roster the way you'd evaluate hires: read the prompt files, delete what you'd never use, and measure whether output quality actually improves on your tasks.