# Claude explains when to fold subagents into the main agent loop

> Original title: Building agents: When to fold subagents into your main agent loop

- Source: Claude Blog
- Published: 2026-10-22T04:00:00.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/b2os8utxnyib7kucn9bqokbcn
- Original: https://claude.com/resources/articles/building-agents-when-to-fold-subagents-into-your-main-agent-loop

## Summary

Claude's Applied AI team says a single agent with skills and progressive tool disclosure often beats multi-subagent designs on quality, cost, and latency in enterprise deployments. The post advises keeping subagents where context bloat, parallel work, or tool selection problems justify them, and offers a staged migration approach with task-completion evals. A migration kit with Claude API skills is provided to guide the process.

## Why it matters

The post gives a staged method for folding subagents into a single agent loop, with eval criteria to check each step before committing to the change.