multi-agent — Using several AI agents on one problem — splitting work in parallel, checking each other, or filling different roles like planner and reviewer.
subagent — A separate agent spawned by another to do one scoped piece of work in its own context, returning only the result.
context window — The maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
Why it matters
It lays out a concrete orchestrator-worker pattern for parallel research agents — how to split subtasks, write effective subagentA separate agent spawned by another to do one scoped piece of work in its own context, returning only the result.Full definition → prompts, handle token/context windowThe maximum amount of text a model can consider at once — its working memory for the current conversation or task.Full definition → budgets, and evaluate non-deterministic multi-agentUsing several AI agents on one problem — splitting work in parallel, checking each other, or filling different roles like planner and reviewer.Full definition → output — from a team running it in production. Useful reading before you design your own AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → swarm and rediscover the same coordination failures.
Key quotes
“We found that a multi-agent system with Claude Opus 4 as the lead agent and Claude Sonnet 4 subagents outperformed single-agent Claude Opus 4 by 90.2% on our internal research eval.”
“In our data, agents typically use about 4× more tokens than chat interactions, and multi-agent systems use about 15× more tokens than chats.”
“We found that token usage by itself explains 80% of the variance, with the number of tool calls and the model choice as the two other explanatory factors.”
“When building AI agents, the last mile often becomes most of the journey.”
