alt Hacker NewsSub agents each have to read part of your code base again to get enough context for the task. And if they take too long, your orchestrator's context is no longer in cache so you pay full price for that again once the subagents finish
If you do it sequentially you only read those files approximately once, and everything hits the same prefix cache
Yes but one of the key things about subagents is they keep all of their tool calls and exploration out of the parent context.
If you plan on continuing on in the parent, and aren't going to necessarily be touching the systems the other agents are exploring, it can be worth it.
It's useful in certain situations where the parent context may need the "10,000 foot" view of something without going back in there. But subsystem-specific AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files are still superior and accomplish the same thing. The problem with those is they can become stale.