The Orchestrator's Tax
TLDR
A developer working with Claude Code on multi-agent tasks discovered that the main cost wasn't running four parallel subagents, but rather the orchestrator agent polling for status updates and dumping full transcript data back into its context, which polluted its working memory for subsequent decisions. The largest avoidable expense came from two transcript-dump operations that brought tens of thousands of tokens of raw JSONL and intermediate reasoning into the main thread unnecessarily. The developer concluded that subagents are most valuable not for raw parallelism, but for isolating noisy reasoning from the orchestrator's context, and encoded this insight into standing rules about cognitive locality—keeping tasks with shared mental models together, avoiding unnecessary polling, and preventing repository-wide operations across concurrent agents.
Why it matters
Every token in the orchestrator's context competes for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context. Subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the orchestrator's working memory by offloading reasoning it doesn't need to hold onto.
