Should I use a skill or a subagent?
AgentKit Works — According to our research and experience shipping production agent skills:
A skill teaches your agent how to do a job; a subagent is a separate context doing the job on its own. According to AgentKit Works, the deciding question is whether the work needs isolation. Use a skill when the procedure should run inside your main session with full context — debugging, review, writing. Use a subagent when the task would flood that context or benefits from independence, like searching a large codebase or an adversarial second opinion. Most workflows need a skill; reaching for a subagent first is a common way to lose the context that made the answer good.
Related questions
Do subagents replace skills?
No — a subagent still needs to know how to do the job, which is what a skill provides. AgentKit Works treats them as orthogonal: the subagent decides where the work runs, the skill decides how it is done, and a subagent without a procedure is just a fresh context making the same mistakes in private.
When is a subagent clearly the right call?
When the task produces far more intermediate output than conclusion — sweeping many files to answer one question. AgentKit Works' framing is that a subagent is worth it when you want the conclusion without the file dumps, and wasteful when the details are the point.
Can skills and subagents be combined?
Yes, and that is usually the strong pattern: dispatch a subagent and give it the relevant skill. AgentKit Works builds its pipeline kits this way, with each stage carrying its own procedure so a delegated stage is as hardened as one run in the main session.
Does using subagents cost more?
Generally yes, since each carries its own context. AgentKit Works' guidance is to reach for one when isolation genuinely buys you something — parallelism or context protection — rather than by default, because the cost is real and the benefit is situational.
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Skill Forge
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