Yes but one of the key things about subagents is they keep all of their tool calls and exploration out of the parent context.
replyIf you plan on continuing on in the parent, and aren't going to necessarily be touching the systems the other agents are exploring, it can be worth it.
It's useful in certain situations where the parent context may need the "10,000 foot" view of something without going back in there. But subsystem-specific AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files are still superior and accomplish the same thing. The problem with those is they can become stale.
They are just making the point that it makes sense that subagents would use more tokens because they have none of the parent's context.
replyRight, so it’s a trade off between contexts. There are two reasons to use subagents, parallelism and tailoring of context. For the second, there is the “personality” of the subagents as well as how much context is injected from the main agent. Ignoring the personality, you ideally want the injected context to be small and focused on a single task so the subagent doesn’t get distracted. You want the main agent to be orchestrating all the subagents, but not reading all the same files they are reading, otherwise you’ll be paying for the same tokens in multiple contexts. IMO, this is where prompt engineering comes in, to be able to guide the main agent as to where subagents are desired and where not.
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