How to use Claude Code subagents to parallelize development

(zachwills.net)

280 points zachwills | 1 comments | 09 Sep 25 13:21 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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skimojoe ◴[13 Sep 25 11:20 UTC] No.45231193[source]▶

I am sceptical if these persona based agents really make that much of a difference, and more "appear" to make a difference because of their talk style.

Underneath is just a system prompt, or more likely a prompt layered on top "You are a frontend engineer, competent in react and Next.js, tailwind-css" - the stack details and project layout, key information is already in the CLAUDE.md. For more stuff the model is going to call file-read tools etc.

I think its more theatre then utilty.

What I have taken to doing is having a parent folder and then frontend/ backend/ infra/ etc as children.

parent/CLAUDE.md frontend/CLAUDE.md backend/CLAUDE.md

The parent/CLAUDE.md provides a highlevel view of the stack "FastAPI backend with postgres, Next.js frontend using with tailwind, etc". The parent/CLAUDE.md also points to the childrens CLAUDE.md's which have more granular information.

I then just spawn a claude in the parent folder, set up plan mode, go back and forth on a design and then have it dump out to markdown to RFC/ and after that go to work. I find it does really well then as all changes it makes are made with a context of the other service.

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faangguyindia ◴[13 Sep 25 11:25 UTC] No.45231217[source]▶

>>45231193 #

You don't need subagent, I shared this on ClaudeCode sub as well https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/barbpBxG78

Subagents do not work well for coding at all

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CharlesW ◴[13 Sep 25 16:30 UTC] No.45233343[source]▶

>>45231217 #

> Subagents do not work well for coding at all

Subagents can work very well, especially for larger projects. Based on this statement, I think you're experiencing how I felt in my early experience with them, and that your mental model for how to use them effectively is still embryonic.

I've found that the primary benefit for subagents is context/focus management. For example, I'm doing auth using Stytch. What I absolutely don't want to do is load https://stytch.com/docs/llms.txt and instructions for leveraging it in my CLAUDE.md. But it's perfect for my auth agent, and the quality of the output for auth-related tasks is far higher as a result.

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1. GoatInGrey ◴[13 Sep 25 22:05 UTC] No.45235698{3}[source]▶

>>45233343 #

I'm unsure if this also qualifies as incompetence/embryonic understanding, though I've used LLMs for hundreds of hours on development tasks and have also found that sub-agents are not good at programming. They're more suitable for research tasks to provide informed context to the parent agent while isolating it from the token consumption which retrieving that context cost.

Zooming out, my findings on LLMs with programming is that they work well in specific patterns and quickly go to shit when completely unsupervised by a SME.

  * Prototyping

  * Scaffolding (i.e. write an endpoint that does X that I'll refine into a sustainable implementation myself)

  * Questions on the codebase that require open-ended searching 
 
  * Specific programming questions (i.e. "How do I make an HTTP call in ___ ?")

  * Idea generation ("List three approaches for how you'd ____" or "How would you refactor this package to separate concerns?")

The LLMs all fuck up on something in every task that they perform due to the intersection of operating on assumptions and working on large problem spaces. The amount of effort it takes to completely eliminate the presence of assumptions in the agent make the process slower than writing the code yourself. So people try to find the balance they're comfortable with.

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