You’re right that subagents were more likely to cause issues than be helpful. But, when properly understood, lead to so much time saved through parallelization for tasks that warranted it.

I was having codex organize my tv/movie library the other day by having it generate. most of the files were not properly labeled. I had codex generate transcripts, manually search the movie db to find descriptions of show episodes, and match the show descriptions against the transcripts to figure out which episode/season the show belonged to.

Claude Code could have parallelized those manual checks and finished that task at 8x the speed.