Comment by skippyboxedhero
13 hours ago
It isn't sub agents. The gap with existing tooling is that the abstraction is over a task rather than a conversation (due to the issue with third-party apps, Claude Code has been inherently limited to conversations which is why they have been lacking in this area, Claude Code Web was the first move in this direction), and the AI is actually coordinating the work (as opposed to being constantly prompted by the user).
One of the issues that people had which necessitated this feature is that you have a task, you tell Claude to work on it, and Claude has to keep checking back in for various (usually trivial) things. This workflow allows for more effective independent work without context management issues (if you have subagents, there is also an issue with how the progress of the task is communicated by introducing things like task board, it is possible to manage this state outside of context). The flow is quite complex and requires a lot of additional context that isn't required with chat-based flow, but is a much better way to do things.
The way to think about this pattern - one which many people began concurrently building in the past few months - is an AI which manages other AIs.
It isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress.
It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.
Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different.
It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting. It is possible that they have worked out some way to do this, but when you have tens of tasks, merge conflicts, you are running that prompt over months, etc. At best, it doesn't work. At worst, you are burning a lot of tokens for nothing.
It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works. If you are just using OpenRouter, it is also not easy because, after setting up tools/rebuilding Claude Code, it is very challenging to setup an environment so the AI can work effectively, errors can be returned, questions returned, etc. Afaik, this is basically what Aider does...it is not easy, it is especially not easy in Claude Code which has a lot of binding choices from the business strategy that Anthropic picked.
> Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting.
You ask if I've tried to do this, and then set constraints that are completely different to what I described.
I have done what I described. Several times for different projects. I have a setup like that running right now in a different window.
> It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works.
It is how Claude Code works when you give it a number of sub-agents with rules for how to manage files that effectively works like task queues, or skills/mcp servers to interact with communications tools.
> it is not easy
It is not easy to do in a generic way that works without tweaks for every project and every user. It is reasonably easy to do for specific teams where you can adjust it to the desired workflows.
It's natural to assume that subagents will scale to the next level of abstraction; as you mentioned, they do not.
The unlock here is tmux-based session management for the teammates, with two-way communication using agent inbox. It works very well.
> Claude Code has been inherently limited to conversations
How so? I’ve been using “claude -p” for a while now.
But even within an interactive session, an agent call out is non-interactive. It operates entirely autonomously, and then reports back the end result to the top level agent.
Because of OAuth. If they gave people API keys then no-one buys their ludicrously priced API product (I assume their strategy is to subsidise their consumer product with the business product).
You can use Claude Code SDK but it requires a token from Claude Code. If you use this token anywhere else, your account gets shut down.
Claude -p still hits Claude Code with all the tools, all the Claude Code wrapping.
That’s not what this subthread is about. They’re talking about the subagent within Claude Code itself.
Btw, you can use the Claude Agent SDK (the renamed Claude Code SDK) with a subscription. I can tell you it works out of the box, and AFAIK it is not a ToS violation.
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I believe they’re talking about Claude Code’s built-in agents feature which works fine with a Max subscription.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/sub-agents
Are you talking about the same thing or something else like having Claude start new shell sessions?
> If they gave people API keys then no-one buys their ludicrously priced API product
The main driver for those subscriptions is that their monthly cost with Opus 3.7 and up pays itself back in couple hours of basic CC use, relative to API prices.
can't you just rip the oauth client secret out of the code?