Subagents.

Subagents are secondary AI workers your main AI agent spins up to handle the grunt work: reading files, running searches, running tests, doing the intermediate analysis. They work like a manager delegating. The main agent hands off a task, the subagent does it, then sends a summary back.

The reason that matters is the Context window, which is how much your AI can hold in its head at once. If your main agent reads twenty files itself, it clogs up fast and the quality drops. Push that work to subagents and they each burn through their own context, then report back the short version. Your main agent stays clean for the actual decisions.

They also run in parallel, so you can fire off several at once instead of waiting on one long chain. It's the closest thing to having a small team working under you while you keep the overview.