Claude Code Subagents Can Now Spawn Subagents

Claude Code now lets subagents spin up their own subagents — so what happens when the delegation stack goes three, four, five levels deep? We trace the real history of spawn-depth defaults (five layers, then one, then three), the environment variable that controls it, and the striking convergence across Gemini CLI, Cursor, Google's ADK 2.0, Anthropic's Managed Agents, the OpenAI Agents SDK, and LangGraph. Then we get to the uncomfortable part: the published literature on recursive delegation stops at depth three. We dig into the ADaPT paper from NAACL Findings 2024, MIT's Recursive Language Models, and Anthropic's multi-agent research numbers — fifteen times the tokens, a single global budget cap, and no per-branch containment. If you've wondered whether A2A is running under the hood, the answer is no — and what's there instead is more interesting.

Episode 6040 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6040 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/045336)