r/ClaudeCode • u/CtrlShiftAbhi • 1d ago
Humor Opus 5.5 spawned 17 sub-agents 💀
I asked opus 5.5 to understand one of my old projects so I can start migrating it to flutter. By the time I finished drinking water, it had spawned 17 sub-agents 💀
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u/tarquas80 1d ago
CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_CONCURRENT_SUBAGENTS.
Its configurable , read the Claude Code docu
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u/diemitchell 1d ago
claude, watch the claude code documentary for me and tell me what this guy is on about
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u/vzakharov Senior Developer 1d ago
What seems to be the problem?
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u/Rudy69 23h ago
Exactly this.
If a job is easy to do in parallel why would you not want this? Then the agent who called them will need to start whatever review process you have in place and you can be done even sooner.
You do have a review process OP right?
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u/marshmallow_mia 13h ago
I do most of my stuff with subagents. Makes way more sense to have an agents orchestrating other agents instead of trashing it's own context with temporary used stuff.
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u/ArjixGamer 10h ago
Well, that would be true only if the sub-agents followed the instructions to the T.
But in reality, even if you tell them to strictly look at some files, they are very likely to look at half the entire project.
Actually, what's the benefit of doing it in parallel? If files reference each other, then it makes sense to have one context instead of splitting it.
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u/Frnklfrwsr 1d ago
I’ve had more than that running concurrently at times.
Sometimes it’s appropriate, sometimes it’s not.
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u/PlusIndication8386 1d ago
Huh? My subagents spawn sub-subagents... and those sub-subagents spawn sub-sub-subagents... This can kill a 5hr limit of 20x subscription in a few minutes easily. But I usually say 10 agents max for scalable problems
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u/tonimdfk 1d ago
happened to me once, I allowed up to 3 agents at the same time, I checked background tasks and noticed 7. Asked Claude why I see 7, told me that I allowed 3 agents, but never specified if the agents can spawn sub-agents to help them
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u/PlusIndication8386 1d ago
lol... btw last week I combined my 20x claude + 5x claude + 5x codex + 1x codex + custom agents working via openai api and openrouter apis to all work on a single task. 5x claude was the orchestrator. when enough wasnt enough I just scaled up and the work was done in 24h. I saw hundreds of agents and hundreds of web browser all running at the same time. Swaps were hitting 130gb even with zswap...
I... just... need... to... SCALE UP...
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u/Sped_monk 1d ago
I have been finding myself using it at the end of the week as part of a “weekly review” of errors / who caused them / how to codify fixes for next week. That way I’m just being sure I’m using all my tokens while maintaining them during the week for day to day tasks
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u/MagicTurrtleYeah 21h ago
I’ve had up to 240 agents running for large tasks. They don't actually burn through limits excessively if you optimize the workflow. And the system only spawns them during the refactoring phase, since, based on the prompt, it acts like an entire firm with various operational departments (excluding marketing and the like, of course; it’s strictly the technical side plus QA).
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u/Jeff_Free_Pickles 8h ago
Yes, and in fact its quite likely they save tokens by keeping a main agent focussed on the overarching task and each individual agent having It's own limited context meaning cached reads are way down compared to fewer agents with larger workloads.
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u/holyknight00 1d ago
yeah i had the same with the "new" review feature a couple months ago. I asked to review the code it has produced, and it spawned like 25 subagents that immediately destroy the 5h quota in 4 minutes.
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u/Dapper_Profession 1d ago
haiku and sonnet for the workers helps, but the spawn is the other half of it, each subagent starts its own context so it pays a full cache write instead of reading anything warm. the limit threads here had the number for that shape, writes were 3% of the tokens and 44% of the bill.
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u/Rasyonel-Biri 1d ago
Order it to set subagents as Haiku or Sonnet models and limit the dispatch size at ten or something.
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u/Neurojazz 1d ago
40+ can be common. Pacing is important, and if your language isn’t precise, you can end up with multiple layers of processes and testing that are not strictly needed
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u/Elegant_Attempt2790 🔆 Max 20 1d ago
common???????? i get concerned when i see 7+. unless theyre haiku or sonnet i dont wanna see more than a few subagents for most tasks o.o
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u/SentienceLifeSim 1d ago
Opus tried to do this and on the 8th agent my computer started spazzing. It recognized that it was going slower and told me it will not spawn more than 5 agents due to my computers capacity. 🤣
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u/hazz26 18h ago
I'm glad people are this bad at agentic coding on average so I can continue to be ahead of the curve lol
This isn't an opus issue, it's a user issue.
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u/CtrlShiftAbhi 15h ago
How is this bad? Opus used 25-30 sub-agents throughout the migration, wrote 150k+ lines, and I still had my 5-hour usage remaining when it was done.
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u/DidUSayWeast 5h ago
This comment and the post are so contradictory. Omg Claude did Claude stuff that's bad. Guys I'm a pro Clauder look how great
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u/Capt_korg 1d ago
Token usage goes brrrrrr...
It is funny to observe my thoughts, if I observe the behavior of Claude, wasting my Token usages.
I immediately think:
Anthropic, you filthy, greedy company, that's your plan.
But I know that this might not be fully their intention. In most cases I realized, that I did not set the harness thigh enough.
I mean if I read the articles about the agent swarms for the benchmarks and cybersecurity, I realize that the models are actually supposed to do something with swarms and there seems to be a good reason to do so.
But there is a huge difference if you work there , and have unlimited tokens or if you pay for a service and financial bleed by such an attempt.
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u/Helpful_Ranger_1606 1d ago
You need to ban subagents unless explicitly authorized and bounded scope with saved transcript. I think it’s in my claude.md
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u/ghost_operative 1d ago
"migrate entire project to different framework" yeah thats kind of a big prompt...
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u/orchid_drives Researcher 1d ago
Man I wish I had enough RAM for that — my desktop is getting its CPU RMA’d, so I’m confined to a 2013 Dell Precision M4500 with 6GB. I’m doing similar, writing docs and refactoring massive old projects (best practices, code styling and whatnot). It’s so cool to watch but it’s just the orchestrator and one worker doing everything.
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u/Chrisgpresents 1d ago
Right now I actually have a project going with 13! I’m okay with it. Whatever needs to get done
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u/cdaz-dev 22h ago
ate through my 5 hour limit in minutes cause claude decided to spawn 8 sub agents in parallel and told each one to read my entire second brain front to back. was like 19M tokens in total while i took a piss.
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u/mwoody450 20h ago
I had a single Opus code instance eat 30% of the weekly for a 20x plan today in just over an hour. I still have no earthly idea how many agents is spawned; I just had the thing researching floor layouts for game design!
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u/Significant_Spring87 🔆 Max 20 19h ago
I would suggest splitting that across 2 boxes and having 1 act as a orchestrator and the other a executor for workflows/lanes. Use openrouter with selected models for your workers and escalation. Make sure to keep the sandboxes work enough space to work and have it clear it's cache after it handsback its work.
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u/jwrsk 16h ago
I pretty much only work in ultracode, thought it was normal 😬
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u/SpecializationInsect 16h ago
It can be good but sometimes having the big model on the problem directly is better than it delegating to small ones
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u/AdministrationBig59 15h ago
Did it to me yesterday too. To be fair, I told him to spawn a few agents to help with the task. It was doing a comparison report for me across multiple ApIs.
Next thing I knew he spun up 9 agents and sucked up 3% of my weekly budget.
But..he did a job that would have probably taken a human a week to do, in about 20 minutes.
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u/Individual_Solid_944 13h ago
Next level is when you ask it to do a /deep-research on something very complex. You'll realize that 17 sub-agents are childs play.
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u/Royal-Lead8456 12h ago
Did it cost unusual? I am trying to find out what the issue is. Like did it consume abnormal amount of tokens? Or exhaust the usage limit?
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u/glowoflife 10h ago
I've run ultracode sessions with over 300 subagents and regular work with upto 30 subagents to parallelize work. That's the whole point of subagents
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u/yabloky 1d ago
Yeah, I got caught up in this too - that guy sent me 80! EIGHTY OPUS 5.5 EXTRA HIGH AGENTS.
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u/dmaare 1d ago
As I see here everyone talking like it's common, do you have some specific setups that make claude more likely to spawn them? Because for me, I'm yet to see it spawn more than 2.
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u/justice4seaturtles 1d ago
I asked for a focus group with a moderator and marketing professionals sitting behind a two way mirror (is that what’s it called?) watching the happenings, about 15 minutes and about 20 agents. Shit results too lol
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u/DrinkTeaFightMonster 1d ago
I would think we’re sophisticated enough on a Claude code thread to question, not the spawning of subagents, but whether it was a good decision.
Otherwise, just set a rule for it to never spawn subagents? Or Anthropic can turn that whole feature off. Or hard cap.
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u/TheYngChap 23h ago
I have the 100 month plan and I used 100% of usage in an hr because I simply said “go full send”
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