Vibe CodingSubagent
A secondary AI agent that a main agent spins up to handle part of a task — often with its own clean context — then reports results back to the main conversation.
Instead of one agent doing everything in a single, ever-growing context, a main agent can delegate a self-contained piece of work — researching how a library’s API works, searching a large codebase for a pattern — to a subagent. That subagent runs its own mini agentic loop in an isolated context, then returns a summary, keeping the noisy intermediate steps (file reads, failed searches) out of the main conversation.
This multi-agent pattern is increasingly common in coding tools as a way to manage context rot: a focused subagent can dig through fifty files and only the useful conclusion comes back, rather than all fifty files’ worth of tokens.
Why it matters
Subagents keep the main task focused and let work happen in parallel, but each one adds coordination overhead and cost — they’re worth it for genuinely separable side-quests, not every small step.