Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but that’s not what matters most in long-running multi-agent work. Every token in the orchestrator’s context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context, not how fast it runs. I argue that subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the orchestrator’s working memory, offloading reasoning it doesn’t need to hold onto. Doing this well means giving the orchestrator explicit ground rules for when and how to delegate. This is exploratory work, built from one real incident, and it ends with more open questions than settled answers. — Read More