Orchestrator-Worker Model
Represents the fundamental architecture for Claude sub-agent systems. This pattern employs a lead agent (typically Claude Opus 4) that coordinates multiple specialized sub-agents (commonly Claude Sonnet 4) operating in parallel. The lead agent functions as a strategic orchestrator, analyzing complex requests, decomposing them into manageable subtasks, and spawning specialized sub-agents to tackle components simultaneously. This architecture delivers substantial performance improvements over single-agent approaches on complex research tasks.
Independent Context Windows
Each sub-agent operates with its own isolated 200K token context window, preventing context pollution that plagues single-agent systems when handling multiple complex tasks. This separation allows true parallel processing—agents investigating different aspects of a problem don’t interfere with each other's