We have been trying to get Claude Code subagents to work well on a big production codebase. So far we haven’t had much luck.
Most of the time Claude doesn’t bother using a subagent even when the prompt is (IMO) pointing in that direction. When forced to, things get done much slower, and the final output is pretty similar in subjective quality.
It’s possible we are doing it wrong, but maybe we’re also observing the phenomenon you saw - since Claude wrote all our subagent config, it might just be saying “I already know all that stuff without needing to fork into separate agents”.
That makes sense; Claude Code recently added the ability to tag subagents with @ to force them to execute, so I think they are running into similar limitations internally.
Fascinating research!
We have been trying to get Claude Code subagents to work well on a big production codebase. So far we haven’t had much luck.
Most of the time Claude doesn’t bother using a subagent even when the prompt is (IMO) pointing in that direction. When forced to, things get done much slower, and the final output is pretty similar in subjective quality.
It’s possible we are doing it wrong, but maybe we’re also observing the phenomenon you saw - since Claude wrote all our subagent config, it might just be saying “I already know all that stuff without needing to fork into separate agents”.
That makes sense; Claude Code recently added the ability to tag subagents with @ to force them to execute, so I think they are running into similar limitations internally.
Great research .. please see my article where I referenced your work https://medium.com/@anandglider/current-ai-systems-are-trapped-in-an-eternal-present-424cd5d48682