Claude Code’s sub-agents are perfect for breaking down complex problems into manageable, specialized units. Think of them as individual workers you can assign to specific, well-defined jobs. This allows you to keep your main agent focused on higher-level logic and design, while sub-agents handle the grunt work.
For instance, imagine you’re building a new API endpoint and need to generate boilerplate code for data validation. You can define a sub-agent specifically for this. In your mcp.yaml configuration, you might have an entry like this:
agents:
validator_generator:
description: "Generates C# code for data validation attributes based on schema."
prompt: |
Given the following JSON schema, generate C# validation attributes
for each property. Include appropriate DataAnnotations like [Required],
[StringLength], and [Range].
Schema:
Then, in your main agent’s prompt, you can invoke this sub-agent:
Main Task: Create a new CustomerController in C# for the '/api/customers' endpoint.
Sub-tasks:
1. Generate validation attributes for the Customer DTO using agent 'validator_generator' with the provided schema.
2. Create the basic controller structure with GET, POST, PUT, DELETE methods.
By separating concerns, your main agent doesn’t need to “know” the intricacies of generating every single validation attribute. It simply orchestrates by calling the validator_generator sub-agent with the relevant input_schema. This makes your prompts cleaner, your agents more modular, and your development process significantly more efficient. Experiment with creating sub-agents for tasks like generating unit tests, writing documentation snippets, or even refactoring small code sections.