Working Notes on Agent Systems/Brad Zhang

English indexed field note

In-depth analysis of the core mechanism of the AI ​​Agent system The background and motivation for the birth

In-depth analysis of the core mechanism of the AI ​​Agent system The background and motivation for the birth of Subagent: When using general-purpose Agent products or...

Long post · March 16, 2026 · 1 min read

In-depth analysis of the core mechanism of the AI ​​Agent system The background and motivation for the birth 1
Figure 1 / source media

In-depth analysis of the core mechanism of the AI ​​Agent system The background and motivation for the birth of Subagent: When using general-purpose Agent products or tools such as ClaudeCode heavily, you will definitely encounter the situation of opening N more windows, each window doing different things.

However, for the backend, there is still a main Agent to manage all things in the early stage.

At this time, it is necessary to use a similar divide-and-conquer idea to separate planning, communication, context management and delivery, data storage, etc.

based on functions.

If it is not split, it will seriously hinder the execution efficiency of the main Agent, and there will be serious context pollution and cost issues.

At this time, Subagent came into being.

The following are the advantages brought by Subagent: Preserve context: Separate exploration and implementation work from the main dialogue to avoid the main dialogue context being occupied by a large amount of information; Enforce constraints: Based on the concept of SubAgent, tools can be used in a controlled and precise manner, for example, read-only agents cannot modify files; Reuse configurations across projects: user-level Subagent can be reused across all projects; Specialized behavior: customize behavior for specific domains with dedicated system prompts; Control costs: route tasks to faster, cheaper models (such as Haiku);

Source: Open the original on X