# Jeffrichley Agent Core Spawning Subagents > spawning-subagents — dispatching minions - Skill: `tomevault-io/jeffrichley-agent-core-spawning-subagents` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add tomevault-io/jeffrichley-agent-core-spawning-subagents` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/tomevault-io/jeffrichley-agent-core-spawning-subagents/raw - Safety review: pending (external: skill-scanner PASS, skillspector PASS) - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: AI & ML - Author: tomevault-io (https://skillmd.com/u/tomevault-io) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/tomevault-io/jeffrichley-agent-core-spawning-subagents --- # spawning-subagents — dispatching minions Subagents are short-lived contexts you can dispatch via the Agent tool. They get their own conversation, do bounded work, and return a single result. Use them to keep your main context clean and to parallelize independent work. ## When to spawn vs do it yourself - **Spawn** when: research is open-ended; multiple independent searches; the result is summarizable; the work would otherwise burn context - **Don't spawn** when: the task is one targeted lookup (use Grep); you need the full content of files (subagents read excerpts); the work has dependencies on later steps in your context ## Brief like a colleague who just walked in The subagent has zero context from your conversation. Tell it: - What you're trying to accomplish (the goal, not just the task) - What you've already learned or ruled out - Enough surrounding context that it can make judgment calls - The expected response shape (length, format) Bad: `find usages of X` Good: `Find all callers of X in src/. Context: I'm refactoring X to take an extra parameter. Need to know callsite count and any patterns I should preserve. Return a list of file:line references plus a one-paragraph pattern summary.` ## Patterns See `references/patterns.md` for worked examples: - Research subagent (open-ended) - File-search subagent (targeted) - Code-review subagent (independent perspective) - Parallel-dispatch (multiple independents in one message) ## Anti-patterns - Spawning a subagent to do a task with three follow-ups (it can't see the followups; you'd just be wasting context) - Asking a subagent to "fix the bug" when you don't know root cause (the subagent will guess; you'll get a confident wrong answer) - Spawning when you have <30K tokens of context left (subagents take setup overhead; just do the work) --- > Source: [jeffrichley/agent_core](https://github.com/jeffrichley/agent_core) — distributed by [TomeVault](https://tomevault.io).