# What Is a Subagent?

> A subagent is a specialist AI agent that a parent agent delegates work to — with its own instructions, tools, and scope — so complex jobs can be split without one overloaded loop.

**Term:** Subagent  
**Category:** Architecture  
**Also known as:** sub-agent, specialist agent, delegated agent  
**Updated:** 2026-08-03  
**Canonical:** https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/subagent

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A **subagent** is a specialist agent that a parent (or orchestrator) agent delegates work to. It has its own instructions, tools, and often its own memory boundary — scoped to one job, not the whole product.

Subagents exist because a single agent that can do everything tends to do nothing well. Narrow roles reduce tool sprawl, keep prompts focused, and make failures easier to isolate.

## When to use a subagent

Use a subagent when a task needs:

- **Different tools** than the parent should hold (e.g. write access to production data)
- **Different expertise** packed as skills or prompts
- **Isolation** so a long research or coding job doesn't pollute the main conversation
- **Parallelism** — independent specialists working at the same time

Don't spawn subagents for every tiny step. Delegation has overhead: handoff context, result synthesis, and orchestration complexity.

## Subagent vs. multi-agent system

A **subagent** is usually a child role inside one product workflow — the parent remains the face of the interaction. A **multi-agent system** may be peer agents coordinating through an orchestrator, with no single "main" conversational agent. In practice the patterns overlap; the design question is who owns the user relationship and who owns each capability.

## Related reading

See [Multi-Agent System](/glossary/multi-agent-system) for peer coordination, and [Agent Orchestration](/glossary/agent-orchestration) for routing and handoffs.

## Related terms

- [multi agent system](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/multi-agent-system.md)
- [agent orchestration](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/agent-orchestration.md)
- [skills](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/skills.md)
- [ai agent](https://www.frameworkr.com/glossary/ai-agent.md)


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_Published by Frameworkr — https://www.frameworkr.com_