Anthropic Says Delete Your Subagents
Trust What Your Agents Ship, New Course - COURSE & COMMUNITY https://switchdim.s.gy/yt-fold-subagents-trim-skills Anthropic's Applied AI team now says most agents should fold their subagents into one agent loop with skills: better quality, often cheaper and faster. The reason isn't that subagents were a mistake. The models got better, and the harness we built around them didn't shrink to match. I go through Anthropic's guide and why it's happening now, show how to fold a Claude Code subagent into a skill and test it, cover when a subagent still earns its place, and finish with a quick pass on skills and CLAUDE.md. SOCIALS X: https://x.com/robshocks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertoshaughnessy/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therobshocks/ WORK & COLLABS info@switchdimension.com SOURCES Anthropic, When to fold subagents into your main agent loop: https://claude.com/resources/articles/building-agents-when-to-fold-subagents-into-your-main-agent-loop Anthropic, Building effective agents: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-agents Anthropic, How we built our multi-agent research system: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/multi-agent-research-system Cognition, Don't Build Multi-Agents: https://cognition.ai/blog/dont-build-multi-agents Lost in Implicit Routing: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18522 Agent Skills Can Be Harmful: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11888 Shortening agent skills leaves LLM agent cost unchanged: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03048 Jediah Katz, Is the Agent Harness Dead?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y4sbZgBdnc CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:57 What Anthropic Actually Said 2:32 Why Now: The Model Grew, the Harness Didn't 4:04 How to Fold One 5:19 When You Still Want a Subagent 6:37 Side Note: Your Skills and Your CLAUDE.md 7:56 The Honest Counterpoint 8:50 The Checklist 9:46 Outro #ClaudeCode #Subagents #AIagents #Anthropic #AgentHarness #AgentDevelopment #AIDevelopment #MultiAgent #AgentSkills #CLAUDEmd #ContextEngineering #AIevals #ClaudeOpus #CursorAI #BuildWithAI
