Navigating Claude Code: Subagents Done Right

Previously in the series

• The Bare Minimum Setup
• CLAUDE.md Done Right
• Models, Tiers, and Effort
• The Context Window Tax
• Hooks That Guard Your Code
• MCP Servers Worth Adding
• Skills That Actually Fire

Introduction

Every tool call, file read, and exploratory detour in Claude Code's main conversation eats into the same context window. Do a codebase research pass that comes back with 4,000 tokens of findings, and that's 4,000 fewer tokens available for everything that follows — do it three or four times, and you're already compacting history before you've touched a single file.

Subagents are the mechanism for keeping that cost out of your main conversation. Each subagent runs in its own isolated context window, does its work, and returns only the result. The main session sees the summary, not the journey.

In the previous article, I covered skills — reusable slash commands that run inside your main conversation context....

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