alt Hacker NewsIt isn't "just" sub agents, but you can achieve most of this just with a few agents that take on generic roles, and a skill or command that just tells claude to orchestrate those agents, and a CLAUDE.md that tells it how to maintain plans and task lists, and how to allow the agents to communicate their progress.
It isn't all that hard to bootstrap. It is, however, something most people don't think about and shouldn't need to have to learn how to cobble together themselves, and I'm sure there will be advantages to getting more sophisticated implementations.
Right, but the model is still: you tell the AI what to do, this is the AI tells other AIs what to do. The context makes a huge difference because it has to be able to run autonomously. It is possible to do this with SDK and the workflow is completely different.
It is very difficult to manage task lists in context. Have you actually tried to do this? i.e. not within a Claude Code chat instance but by one-shot prompting. It is possible that they have worked out some way to do this, but when you have tens of tasks, merge conflicts, you are running that prompt over months, etc. At best, it doesn't work. At worst, you are burning a lot of tokens for nothing.
It is hard to bootstrap because this isn't how Claude Code works. If you are just using OpenRouter, it is also not easy because, after setting up tools/rebuilding Claude Code, it is very challenging to setup an environment so the AI can work effectively, errors can be returned, questions returned, etc. Afaik, this is basically what Aider does...it is not easy, it is especially not easy in Claude Code which has a lot of binding choices from the business strategy that Anthropic picked.