Subagents

BATON explores robot subtasks independently, stores their solutions, and manages handoffs between them, replacing multiplicative whole-task search with additive composition.

A walkthrough of Anthropic’s architect exam doubles as a harness checklist: inspect stop reasons, narrow subagent scope, isolate outputs, and compact long-running context.

The talk argues that agents are an early interface, not the endpoint, and demonstrates reusable primitives for AI-native software: persistent subagents, compressed context, loaded skills, generated UI, and voice.

Production agent velocity depends less on model swaps than on automating the developer loop: isolate parallel work, encode workflows as skills, connect tools, and keep humans as verifiers.

A fixed chain of specialist agents lost context and produced incoherent recommendations. The replacement separates deterministic detection, gives one agent end-to-end ownership, and uses subagents only for bounded investigations.

Vercel AI Gateway added Gemini 3.6 Flash for coding and web work and Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite for scoped subagent tasks, both available through AI SDK model IDs.

Cursor’s SQLite experiment suggests swarm harness design can matter more than model mix: separate planner and worker contexts reduced coordination churn while cheaper workers handled most tokens.

Muse Spark 1.1 gives agent builders a 1M-token multimodal model with parallel tool calls, MCP support, and the option to run as a main agent or subagent.

career-ops shows how a coding-agent harness can run personal operations: structured scoring, parallel workers, document generation, and human approval around a durable data store.