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?

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