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Comment by gner75

1 day ago

I'm not sure I get this. If anything, they'll consume less tokens, because their context will possibly contain a subset of the original single agent prompt, and they only need to see a subset of the original single agent history.

What am I missing?

Take a look at my example here - having a bunch of sub-agents perform a task consumed 50,000+ tokens each across 5 subtasks, because each one had to consume duplicate information. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/11/sub-agents/

  • But that's down to the way Claude Code has implemented it? If I code this myself I could engineer so that the subagents don't have overlapping context with the orchestrator.

    Also, memory itself can be a tool the subagent calls to retrieve only the stuff it needs.