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How sub-agents work

The model picks a sub-agent through a tool call:

run_agent("web-researcher", "Research Qdrant")

The sub-agent runs in its own session — own prompt, tools and model — does its work, and returns the result. Sub-agents can call sub-agents recursively, up to a depth of 5; each sub-agent call times out after 2 hours.

Sub-agent recursion

Why delegate?​

  • Decompose complex tasks into focused sub-tasks.
  • Parallelism — several sub-agents work at once.
  • Specialization — each sub-agent has a tailored prompt and toolset.
  • Smaller main context — the orchestrator only sees results, not every intermediate tool call.

The call as a comic​

A travel agent delegating flight search to a specialized sub-agent — the same shape as research-lead calling web-researcher:

Sub-agent call