Delegate noisy side tasks to subagents
Codebase searches and log digs flood your context. A subagent does the work in isolation and hands back only the summary.
Claude Code’s docs are blunt: the context window is your most important resource, and quality degrades as it fills.
Subagent vs. skill
- Subagent: runs in its own isolated context. Use it for deep searches, log analysis or dependency audits whose intermediate results you’ll never look at again. You get the conclusion, not 40 file reads.
- Skill: runs inside your main thread, so you can watch and steer each step.
Try
“Use a subagent to find every place we read the FEATURE_FLAGS env var and report file paths only.”