Subagents help when work can be split into independent streams like research, analysis and testing. They add overhead when the task is simple or tightly coupled.
- Good split: research competitors, analyze pricing, test assumptions, synthesize final brief.
- Bad split: three agents all editing the same paragraph.
- Good split: one agent investigates logs while another reviews recent code changes.
- Bad split: using subagents to make a two-minute task look sophisticated.
Subagent decomposition
Break this task into subagents only if the work is genuinely separable. For each proposed subagent, define objective, inputs, tools, output, and how the main agent should synthesize the result.
Task:
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