Chapter 8. Subagents, Agent Teams, and Plugins
Chapter 6 gave the agent repeatable workflows through skills. Chapter 7 connected it to live systems through MCP. Both still assume one agent in one session. Some tasks want more than that. A large review benefits from several distinct perspectives at once, and a single session cannot hold them all without its attention spreading thin.
One of my custom subagents is a Java test quality expert. It reviews a feature branch in the background, uses the SonarQube MCP server from Chapter 7, and reports whether one person can reasonably maintain the result. I created it through a conversation with Claude Code. Among the rules I added for the testing agent are “do not modify existing code until the tests have run”. The unexpected part was that I had to tell it to run the tests. You’d think telling it to write the tests would be enough, but that turns out not to be the case.
Subagents
A subagent is a specialized worker inside a single Claude Code session. To see why that matters, consider ...
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