For example, say you want to search for bugs in 100 code files. Ask Claude to “use subagents to look for bugs across these files” and it will likely spin up 5 agents, each taking a different section of the codebase. Theoretically in the limit case this is 5x faster than Claude doing it without subagents.

Any kind of problem shaped like map reduce can be accelerated this way: Looking through your banking records, searching through a database, asking Claude to find that one weird file you remember from three years ago but forgot where you saved it, etc.

Just know that there’s no quicker way to hit your limits than to use subagents. So use them if it’s paid for by your work or whenever you need the 5x speed boost.