Subagent
What it does
Spawns autonomous background agents that work independently on tasks. Your assistant can delegate work to parallel workers that run in the background.
Setup required
None. Works immediately.
Permissions
- Subagents inherit the same permission rules as your main assistant
Common prompts
| You say... | What happens |
|---|---|
| “Spawn an agent to research AI startups in healthcare” | Launches background research |
| “Start a background agent to monitor my inbox for the next hour” | Long-running background task |
| “Check on my research agent” | Gets status of a running subagent |
| “Cancel the background agent” | Aborts a running subagent |
Configuration
- Subagents can run in silent mode (no intermediate output) or verbose mode
- Status tracking: pending, running, completed, failed, aborted
- Results are delivered via follow-up message
Tips & gotchas
- Genuinely independent. Subagents run in the background while you continue chatting.
- No shared context. They can't access your current conversation's context unless you explicitly pass it.
- Great for long tasks. Deep research, monitoring, and batch processing are ideal use cases.
- Multiple agents. You can spawn multiple agents and check on them later.