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Equation 1 · Part 5 · Why Claude Code Delegates to Subagents, and What That Actually Buys You

Symbol T_subagent_i

Ttotal=Tparent+∑i=1kTsubagenti,Tparent≪∑i=1kTsubagenti.T_{\mathrm{total}} = T_{\mathrm{parent}} + \sum_{i=1}^{k} T_{\mathrm{subagent}_i}, \qquad T_{\mathrm{parent}} \ll \sum_{i=1}^{k} T_{\mathrm{subagent}_i}.
TsubagentiT_{\mathrm{subagent}_i}

What this part means

TsT_subagentit_i is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

Its job in the formula

TsT_subagentit_i is one of the signed contributions combined to compute the quantity on the left.

The passage around this formula

This is the specific problem a subagent is built to solve, and Claude Code’s own documentation gives a concrete, numeric illustration of the effect rather than an abstract claim about it. In a worked session example, a subagent delegated to research a piece of session-timeout handling reads three files totalling 6,100 tokens of raw source, entirely inside its own isolated window — “None of this touches your main context,” the documentation notes of the reads — and returns a single 420-token summary to the parent conversation, which the documentation flags directly: “That’s the context savings” [ 2 ] . The parent’s window absorbs an addition roughly a fourteenth the size of what was actually…

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Learn the underlying idea

A subscript is a label attached below a symbol. It often selects a time step, component, category, or member of a sequence.

Open the illustrated subscripts: which member of a family? guide →

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.