re: breaking into specialized subagents -- yes, it matters significantly but the splitting criteria isn't obvious at first.

what we found: split on domain of side effects, not on task complexity. a "researcher" agent that only reads and a "writer" agent that only publishes can share context freely because only one of them has irreversible actions. mixing read + write in one agent makes restart-safety much harder to reason about.

the other practical thing: separate agents with separate context windows helps a lot when you have parts of the graph that are genuinely parallel. a single large agent serializes work it could parallelize, and the latency compounds across the whole pipeline.