AI engineering glossary · Agents tools MCP
What is subagent?
Subagent: A helper agent launched by a main agent to handle a focused subtask in its own separate context, returning only a short result. It keeps the main agent's context clean and allows work in parallel.
Subagent: an example
A coding agent spawns a subagent to search a large repository for uses of a function and report just the file names.
Related terms
More Agents tools MCP terms
- Supervisor agent
- Task success rate
- Thought-action-observation
- Tool argument validation
- Tool error handling
- Tool overload
- Tool registry
- Tool retrieval
Where you learn it
Subagent is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.