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AI Coding & Agents5 min read

[AI Context #5] Why Use Subagents? Context Isolation and Delegation

In earlier installments, we explored ways to conserve context: clear history at each work boundary (Part 3) and keep fixed overhead short (Part 4). Yet some tasks remain too large to handle. A typical example is, “Figure out how payment logic flows through this codebase.” A diligent agent would read dozens of files, and as we saw in Part 1, everything it reads accumulates in context. By the time the investigation is complete, no context remains for the actual work that knowledge enables—changing the code.

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