Is this the problem that Claude sub agents are supposed to be solving?

They say they’re are for preserving and managing context and I’ve been wondering if they help with the “too many tools” problem.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents

It can, but I remain deeply unconvinced that the sub-agent architecture works as well as advertised.

The trick with any layering like this is that your end-to-end reliability is subagent_reliability * routing_agent_reliabilitty. Neither are 100% (or anywhere close to it, let's be honest), so the multiplying probabilities are still going to trash your performance.

If you get routed to the correct subagent, then subsequent performance is likely to be solid - but that's because you've taken the `routing_agent_reliability` term out of the equation.

Routing agent reliability hinges pretty heavily on the subagents themselves and how semantically or linguistically similar they are. If you have subagents that are in wildly disparate domains it may work well, but if your subagents start overlapping (or just look like they overlap) then routing accuracy is likely going straight into the dumpster. And a mis-route is catastrophic in that setup.

For very specific agents (well-established workflows that cross multiple, well-defined, non-overlapping domains) the architecture may be suitable, but in terms of the holy grail of the omni-agent (i.e., a desktop app agent suitable for general use) I suspect we'll continue running into a brick wall.