Claude Code has a hardcoded instruction telling Opus 5 not to use subagents

jauntywundrkind

obviously overriding user intent isn't great. it's probably something you can argue about it with, put in your AGENTS.md oh right oops Anthropic refuses to play well CLAUDE.md in strong letters to insist on. but i have to say i'm not super shocked or surprised. simply from the perspective of: i don't think subagents are super great to use anymore! they go off and do a bunch of duplicate research, then come back and deliver a cheap facimile of the information the main agent often already knew. that's definitely not always the case, but i feel like so so so often the main agent would be better just doing the research itself, seeing the things. it can sometimes mean wasting some context on dead-ends. which, in an open model where thinking is actually captured and editable in the api, is not a huge deal. but i don't think claude is capable of the same history editing, afaik, in part probably because it won't actually give you it's thinking trails.

justinclift

https://archive.md/SOf7y

reacharavindh

Why though? They are a cheap way to do something without a whole wall of tokens from the said thing polluting the main context… One would think it is actually a useful thing both for the users and the LLM providers that are compute constrained at the moment..

sscaryterry

I'm honestly so sick of Anthropic nerfing models, fucking around with the system prompts, just working against me/others.

JSR_FDED

Maybe a way to do product segmentation or sandbagging? Then later they can claim gains by removing the restriction on sub-agents.

prtmnth

Anecdotal, I've been running my usual building skills which keep the main agent as the orchestrator and every step from execution, review, bug fix happens via subagents. So far in my 2 days of use of Opus 5 in medium and high effort modes, I haven't not observed it avoid using subagents. I have also not observed it using less subagents than usual in regular chats. However, that could be due to limited use over a small timeframe.

einsteinx2

I’m not sure how true this is, Opus 5 immediately used 2 subagents on the first task I gave it on Friday. In fact my first thought was how it was similar to Fable in that sense.