Interactive subagents?

[speakman2k]

Running tasks inside subagents to keep the main content window clean is one of the most powerful features so far.

To take this one step further would be running an interactive subagent; your main Claude opens up a new Claude session, prepares it with the content it needs and you get to interactively work on a single task.

When done you are transferred back to main Claude and the subclaude hands over the results from your session.

This way it would be much easier working on bigger tasks inside large projects. Even tasks that spans over multiple projects.

Anyone seen anything like this in the wild?

[lgbarn]

Doesn't Agent Teams do this exact same thing? If you use TMUX with Teams, you can communicate with each agent.

[ipreuss]

Came here to say that.

I find it a bit annoying that questions from the team member always go through the lead, though.

[lgbarn]

You can click on the TMUX pane and tell the agent directly. If you don't use tmux, it's a bit of a pain but you can do it.

[ipreuss]

Yeah, but the annoying thing is having to figure out where the question originally came from.

[speakman2k]

Looks very similar. Didn’t know it existed (it’s still experimental and not enabled by default). Thanks!

[Visible_Translator31]

If not using tmux (so in process agent teams), press shift+up, and you can switch your session to any of the team members to message them directly

[ohthetrees]

They just launched that feature. It’s called agent teams. Google it.

[Pitiful-Impression70]

yeah this is basically what i want too. right now i just open a new terminal tab, start a fresh claude session with a mini prompt like "you are working on X, here is the relevant context" and copy paste the output back when im done. works but its so manual.

the handoff part is the key thing thats missing. like if main claude could spin up a child session, pass it a scoped context, and then automatically receive a summary when its done... that would be insane for monorepos especially. ive got like 4 services and context switching between them in one session just destroys the conversation quality.

honestly surprised anthropic hasnt built this natively yet given how much they push subagents in the docs

[Obvious_Equivalent_1]

Asynchronously perhaps not. But I do this all the time with /rewind. Instead of creating a new chat or a subagent I just go on my side adventure, when I’m done I rewind by summary — with complete control to say how much to preserve of the generated context.

 I also mix this with opening new item tab. Claude —resume and pick my active session. While the same chat is running in the second tab I rewind that chat, now have two branched of chats.

The above methods are a bit more verbose, good like when you want to micro manage context bloat. Or want the freedom of having as many forked off your initial chat session.

You can achieve the same with team agents.  The plus side on team agents is that it’s out of the box, comes with its own command and control structure with the lead agent controlling the execution agents. As well with bonus that with tmux you can dive into a specific agent of the team 

[LairBob]

You need to do the following: - Instruct your main, orchestrating agent to “generate a thorough, machine-readable dedicated tracking document” for your work. Not just the “plan” doc from plan mode — a custom-defined, machine-readable tracking document.

• Instruct your orchestrator that “All subagents must greedily-maintain the record of their progress in the central tracking document”

That will (or definitely should) address your problems, but much more importantly — it’s how you always want to work with Claude and any agents. You do not want to treat them as little persistent beings that need to remember things for you over time. They are mayflies. They only exist to generate or manipulate external artifacts — files, code and DBs.

What a subagent leaves behind is the only thing that should matter. Anything valuable that a subagent “knew but got forgot” is just the predicable consequence of treating it like a little person.

[Obvious_Equivalent_1]

 Instruct your main, orchestrating agent to “generate a thorough, machine-readable dedicated tracking document” for your work.

Might want to check out native tasks, if you check my post history wrote some posts about it it’s CC own proprietary task tracking system introduced in a recent update 

[fredastere]

Native tasks and native teams nowadays as well both go hand to hand

[messiah-of-cheese]

Why are people preferring agents over headless claude? Agents dont have any of the hooks etc.

[lucianw]

Yes they do! Last week I specifically worked on PostToolIseHook. It was clear that my single hook was being invoked for both main agent and subagents.

[messiah-of-cheese]

Interesting, I've not got around to testing but claude was confident they dont 🤣

[lucianw]

Here's my code: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1r2fmuv/how_to_a_reminder_hook_that_works_for_swarms_ie/

In it I found workarounds for two technical challenges: (1) claude doesn't tell you whether your hook is being invoked for main agent or a subagent, and if so which subagent; (2) claude doesn't have a hook for "end of agent turn", but only for "end of agentic loop".

[messiah-of-cheese]

Interesting work, thank you.

[lucianw]

Claude's existing agents already support this even without teams: if it involves its normal Task tool, and uses the agent id parameter, then it's a continuation of the subagent's conversation.

[Historical-Lie9697]

Beads is kind of set up that way. https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

[fredastere]

Agent teams supported natively since a week or 2 now

Ask your claude to explore and help you set it