How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

I often see people making these sub agents modelled on roles like product manager, back end developer, etc.

I spent a few hours trying stuff like this and the results were pretty bad compared to just using CC with no agent specific instructions.

Maybe I needed to push through and find a combination that works but I don't find this article convincing as the author basically says "it works" without showing examples or comparing doing the same project with and without subagents.

Anyone got anything more convincing to suggest it's worth me putting more time into building out flows like this instead of just using a generic agent for everything?

This has been my experience so far as well. It seems like just basic prompting gets me much further than all these complicated extras.

At some point you gotta stop and wonder if you’re doing way too much work managing claude rather than your business problem.

I think the trick is the synthesize step which brings the agents findings together. That's where I've had the most success, at least.

Right - don’t make subagents for the different roles, make them to manage context for token heavy tasks.

A backend developer subagent is going to do the job ok, but then the supervisor agent will be missing useful context about what’s been done and will go off the rails.

The ideal sub agent is one that can take a simple question, use up massive amounts of tokens answering it, and then return a simple answer, dropping all those intermediate tokens as unnecessary.

Documentation Search is a good one - does X library have a Y function - the subagent can search the web, read doc MCPs, and then return a simple answer without the supervisor needing to be polluted with all the context

This is exactly right.

No, this has been my experience as well.

I see lots of people saying you should be doing it, but not actually doing it themselves.

Or at least, not showing full examples of exactly how to handle it when it starts to fail or scale, because obviously when you dont have anything, having a bunch of agents doing any random shit works fine.

Frustrating.

This is my experience too.

Make agents for tasks, not roles.

I've seen this for coding agents using spec-driven development for example. You can try to divide agents into lots of different roles that roughly correspond to human job positions, like for example BMad does, or you can simply make each agent do a task and have a template for the task. Like make an implementation plan using a template for an implementation plan or make a task list, using a template for a task list. In general, I've gotten much better results with agents that has a specific task to do than trying to give a role, with a job-like description.

For code review, I don't use a code reviewer agent, instead I've defined a dozen code reviewing tasks, that each runs as separate agents (though I group some related tasks together).

This!

Subagents open all the new metaphorical tabs to get to some answer, then close those tabs so the main agent can proceed with the main task.

Excellent article on this pattern: https://jxnl.co/writing/2025/08/29/context-engineering-slash...

No. I think people like the idea of it and are playing with it because of the hype around "agents", but it's unnecessary IMO.