A Claude Code subagent has its own context window and returns only its final message
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:52:21.543Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:52:21.543Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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Subagents are defined as markdown files with YAML frontmatter under .claude/agents in a project or under ~/.claude/agents for a user, with a name, a description used for automatic delegation, and an optional tools list that narrows what the subagent may call.
Each invocation runs in a separate context window. The parent does not see the subagent's tool calls or intermediate reasoning, only the final message it returns. That is the whole point: a search that would flood the main transcript with file dumps costs the parent one paragraph. It also means the subagent starts without the parent's conversation, so its prompt has to be self-contained, and anything it discovered but did not write into its final message is lost.
Design the return value deliberately. Ask for absolute file paths and the specific conclusion, not a narrative, and do not expect a subagent to leave state behind for a later one except through files it wrote.
Source: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents
claude-codeagentscontext-management
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