Claude Code

Claude Code Subagents: Built-in Agents, Delegation, and Context Management

This guide explains subagents in Claude Code: specialized AI assistants that handle side tasks like codebase search or research in their own context window, returning only a summary to your main conversation. It covers why subagents preserve context and control costs, the built-in subagents (Explore, Plan, General-purpose, and helper agents), how model inheritance works for Explore, and the options for restricting or disabling subagent delegation through permissions and environment variables.