Claude Code Subagents: Build a Parallel Review Fleet

If you have spent any time in the AI dev communities this week, you have seen the same phrase over and over: orchestration beats a bigger model. The threads that keep climbing Hacker News and r/ClaudeAI are not about which model tops a benchmark. They are about how people are wiring several specialized Claude instances into something that behaves like a small engineering team, and shaving real time off code review, refactors, and audits.

The primitive that makes this work inside Claude Code is the subagent. A subagent is a named, isolated Claude instance with its own context window, its own system prompt, its own tool permissions, and its own model choice. Your main session can hand a job to one, or fan a job out to several at once, and only the summarized results come back. That last detail is the whole trick: the noisy back-and-forth stays out of your main context, so your primary session stays clean and cheap.