Section 6 — Memory and Steering
Subagent
An agent spawned by another agent via a tool call. Runs in its own session with its own context window, and reports a single tool result back. Distinct from a handoff — the pare...
An agent spawned by another agent via a tool call. Runs in its own session with its own context window, and reports a single tool result back. Distinct from a handoff — the parent specifically expects a return; a handoff has no return path. Cannot spawn further subagents — the tree is one level deep. Subagents exist to isolate context, not to compose hierarchies.
Usage:
"The grep results are blowing out my context."
"Spawn a subagent to do the search — it'll burn its own context window on the noise and report back the two file paths you actually need."