Anthropic advises folding subagents into one agent with context loaded on demand and releases a migration kit
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
With stronger models, complex "teams" of subagents are often unnecessary: one agent does it faster and cheaper, and Anthropic has provided tools for the switch.
In an article on claude.com, Anthropic writes that a single agent with skills and progressively disclosed context often outperforms both a single all-purpose prompt and a subagent design on quality, often at lower cost and latency. According to it, one customer got roughly 2x faster runtime after switching. The article comes with a single-agent-loop-kit on GitHub, with a guided evaluation and a demo on mock systems, plus three new Claude API skills: build-eval, prompt-audit and hillclimb. The Decoder adds from the same publication: the Claude Code system prompt for newer models was cut by more than 80%, and tool selection degrades beyond 30–50 tool definitions.
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