hitu (@hitu_monke) “A SUBAGENT DOESN'T HAND BACK ITS WORK. IT HANDS BACK A SUMMARY AND THE WORK IS D” — TopicDigg

A SUBAGENT DOESN'T HAND BACK ITS WORK. IT HANDS BACK A SUMMARY AND THE WORK IS DELETED ask claude code something wide, like where errors get handled across this repo, and it doesn't answer in your window. it spawns temporary claudes. each one gets a clean 200k, its own tools, and zero knowledge of what the others are doing. they finish, report in, the main session stitches the answers together the reason is context rot. one window, long session, and the model gets slower, looser and more expensive with every turn you add. the fix here isn't a bigger window. it's spending a whole window you fully intend to throw away so a subagent reads eighty files and returns a paragraph. it ran in parallel with five others that also returned a paragraph. the orchestrator never reads the eighty files. it reads six paragraphs and synthesizes that's the trade nobody says out loud. isolation didn't make the model smarter. it moved what you trust from the work to the write-up, and the write-up is graded by the same thing that wrote it