Subagent or no subagent? I've been noticing this for a while. Some high level thoughts:
Traditional coding tasks are deterministic: clear input, clear output. You can hand them off. Agentic engineering is different. Most of the time, the boundary isn't clear.
Simple tasks have clean boundaries. Most real tasks are tangled. Example: a codebase-explorer subagent with its own context window. The parent gets a summary. Then I spin up a new subagent for a specific change, and it needs details the summary dropped.
Not everything can be isolated. Even in the main thread, during exploration you don't know what you'll need later. The "irrelevant" detail you skipped is the one the next step depends on.
It's the same as human teams. One person vs. a 100-person team: 100 people don't give you 100x. Communication is overhead. Every handoff loses something. Agents are no different.
So the real problem to solve isn't "how many agents." It's knowledge synchronization efficiency: how much context survives each handoff, and at what cost.
That's the bottleneck for multi-agent systems, same as it always was for teams.
Sorry for the wait, the episode is here!
Live action with real robots instead of animation (episode 4): "Anger"
Enjoy!
As always, the software of Microduck and Reachy Mini is open source:
https://t.co/RW1p4V2X6X
https://t.co/hA91qMLZ4d