Comment by alphazard
7 hours ago
Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The reality is these roles don't even work in human organizations today. Classic "job_description == bottom_of_funnel_competency" fallacy.
If they make the LLMs more productive, it is probably explained by a less complicated phenomenon that has nothing to do with the names of the roles, or their descriptions. Adversarial techniques work well for ensuring quality, parallelism is obviously useful, important decisions should be made by stronger models, and using the weakest model for the job helps keep costs down.
My understanding is that the main reason splitting up work is effective is context management.
For instance, if an agent only has to be concerned with one task, its context can be massively reduced. Further, the next agent can just be told the outcome, it also has reduced context load, because it doesn't need to do the inner workings, just know what the result is.
For instance, a security testing agent just needs to review code against a set of security rules, and then list the problems. The next agent then just gets a list of problems to fix, without needing a full history of working it out.
So two things.. Yes this helps with context and is a primary reason to break out the sub-agents.
However one of the bigger things is by having a focus on a specific task or a role, you force the LLM to "pay attention" to certain aspects. The models have finite attention and if you ask them to pay attention to "all things".. they just ignore some.
The act of forcing the model to pay attention can be acoomplished in alternative ways (defined process, commitee formation in single prompt, etc.), but defining personas at the sub-agent is one of the most efficient ways to encode a world view and responsibilities, vs explicitly listing them.
I’ve found that task isolation, rather than preserving your current session’s context budget, is where subagents shine.
In other words, when I have a task that specifically should not have project context, then subagents are great. Claude will also summon these “swarms” for the same reason. For example, you can ask it to analyze a specific issue from multiple relevant POVs, and it will create multiple specialized agents.
However, without fail, I’ve found that creating a subagent for a task that requires project context will result in worse outcomes than using “main CC”, because the sub simply doesn’t receive enough context.
Which, ultimately, is not such a big difference to the reason we split up work for humans, either. Human job specialization is just context management over the course of 30 years.
I suppose it’s could end up being an LLM variant of Conway’s Law.
“Organizations are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Developers do want managers actually, to simplify their daily lives. Otherwise they would self manage themselves better and keep more of the share of revenues for them
Unfortunately some managers get lonely and want a friendly face in their org meetings, or can’t answer any technical questions, or aren’t actually tracking what their team is doing. And so they pull in an engineer from their team.
Being a manager is a hard job but the failure mode usually means an engineer is now doing something extra.