Subagent Parallelism and Coordination Cost Record

Subagent Parallelism and Coordination Cost Record

Google documents subagents as a way to parallelize bounded work and protect the parent context. Subagents can use an inherited workspace, an isolated Git worktree, or shared storage under current documentation. They begin with separate context and inherit safety configurations.

The feature deep dive describes asynchronous subagent work and native worktree support. Projects documentation distinguishes direct local work from new-worktree mode.

Every delegation also creates instructions, context transfer, permissions, shared-state, monitoring, message, merge, verification, and recovery work. Google does not claim that a larger agent count is inherently faster or cheaper.

Dalton's custom rules about director counts, specialist counts, runtime spawning, small inline tasks, automatic completion, and branch isolation are useful operating hypotheses. They are not official defaults or universal optimal values.