# Agent vs subagent: one owns the goal, one does a single task

> An agent owns the goal and talks to you. A subagent is a worker an agent sends off to do a single task and report back. Both are the same kind of worker. "Subagent" is a seat in the workflow, and the label says nothing about rank.

If you assumed a subagent is a smaller, dumber agent, that is the thing to unlearn. They are the same creature. What changes is who owns the goal. Picture a general contractor running your renovation (the agent) and the electrician they call in for one job (a subagent). They are the same kind of professional, each with a different brief.

|                    | Agent                                   | Subagent                                   |
| ------------------ | --------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ |
| **Purpose**        | Owns the whole goal                     | Does one task                              |
| **Talks to**       | You, directly                           | The agent that sent it, not you            |
| **Working memory** | Holds the whole project, so it fills up | Starts fresh, keeps its digging sealed off |
| **Tools**          | Broad, whatever the goal needs          | Scoped to its one task                     |
| **Lifespan**       | Runs from start to finish               | One task, then gone                        |
| **Hands back**     | The finished result                     | A short answer, with the mess left behind  |

## The real reason to split the work is a clean desk

An agent, like a person, can only hold so much in its head at once. When that space fills up, the agent [experiences context rot](https://www.trychroma.com/research/context-rot). If the contractor personally crawled through every wall and read every appliance manual, they would lose the plot of the renovation. So the deep, messy tasks go to a subagent who works in their own room and comes back with just the answer. The agent stays clear-headed for the big picture.

## The catch: subagents cost time and money

Every subagent is a fresh worker who has to be briefed, so a crowd of them can [cost several times as much time and money](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/multi-agent-research-system) as one worker alone. So you delegate the heavy, self-contained tasks and let the small stuff happen in place.

## The bottom line

The same kind of worker can own the goal or handle a single task. An agent owns the goal and talks to you; a subagent is lent out for one task and returns a clean answer. From there, each dispatched worker gets [a subagent definition with a job and an output format](/garden/subagent-brief), and [the one holding the plan](/garden/agent-spec-plan-workspace) decides which worker gets which task.