Everyone designs loops. No one asks what the agent knows each tick.
Loop engineering's six building blocks are context primitives wearing new names. The scheduling is cron; what decides the outcome is the context on each tick.
#subagents
14 posts tagged #subagents.
Your agent re-litigates decisions because you delete the answer.
Session transcripts are an external memory most people delete after 30 days. A skill that greps and re-ranks them turns 'what did we decide' into an answer.
One agent drowns in a 1000-line spec. A hundred finish it by morning.
Decompose a reviewed spec into discrete tasks and spawn a fresh headless agent per task. Each unit gets a clean context window and a pass/fail gate.
Stop writing rules for failures your agent never commits.
Most AGENTS.md files defend against imagined mistakes. Mine your own transcripts, count what the agent actually gets wrong, and let that decide what to write.
Your Reasoning Model Should Never Read Grep Output
Subagents are sold as parallelism. The real win is context hygiene plus model arbitrage: cheap explorers read, and your expensive model sees only findings.
Your smartest worker forgets every job the moment it ships.
Pairing an isolated subagent with the right tools and a slice of your conventions rebuilds the proven agent loop without dragging tool logs into your thread.
An agent watching its context fill rushes the ending. Take the wheel.
When the window fills, agents cut corners and auto-compaction throws away the wrong things. Author a handoff file, eyeball it, restart in a session you control.
Run your whole eval suite on every commit and you'll stop running it.
The fix for slow, flaky agent evals isn't a faster suite - it's two loops. A cheap deterministic gate on every PR, and a slow judge suite on a schedule.
Build the Glossary the Agent Wrote
Vague prompting isn't a skill gap you fix with longer prompts. It's a missing shared vocabulary - and the fix is a committed glossary, not a personal habit.
Cache the Explore
The codebase is your strongest steering signal - stronger than your prompt or your rules. Pay the exploration cost once, freeze it, and feed it to every run.
Commission the Skill, Don't Write It
You don't author a skill from a blank page. You send a subagent to research the problem once, and the research becomes the skill - a build artifact.
Design the Codebase Your Agent Can Read
The highest-leverage thing you can do for your agent isn't a better prompt - it's a better interface. Deep modules are context the agent reads at a glance.
Flat agent swarms demo beautifully and ship terribly.
Let peer agents talk freely and a query hot-potatoes between them while your bill climbs. Route everything through one orchestrator with a turn cap instead.
Package the Workflow, Not the Prompt
A plugin isn't a convenience wrapper. It's how a workflow survives leaving your laptop - the difference between a personal habit and a team standard.