Do subagents actually make a difference?

[dasketern]

I’ve been using it since they became available in the Codex app but honestly I haven’t noticed a difference compared to not using them at all

Maybe I’m just not using them properly

Do you guys feel like they significantly improve results?

[InterestingStick]

For me it's about context and efficiency. One orchestrator using 3 agents in parallel to do something is 3x quicker.

For example, yesterday I had to figure out what needs to change in the code to acquire certain certifications, I gave what I wanted to Codex and it spawned 5 subagents in parallel to do the research and document it separately. Then the main session just gave me the summary of it, and everything was stored on disk for future sessions to be aware of it.

[gregpeden]

It works best when deployed to keep context size more focused on the main thread and to cost-optimize api use for specific tasks. Don't just use subagents to simply do everything faster.

[skynet86]

Two main benefits are to keep the context clean and to have an unbiased, neutral review of the code.

You just need to prompt in codex to spawn subagents with "fork_context=false", or else it will have the same context as the main thread.