Checkpoint agents beat classic subagents in 137k-token Opus 5.5 session

Alexander Yue@Alezander9

Subagents are the biggest cause of AI failures

In most harnesses:
1. Main agent writes a summary of what it knows
2. Subagent starts from that summary only, and makes assumptions
3. Subagent works and sends back a new summary of what it did

Same flaw as compaction: all summaries are lossy. This is how your assistant makes emails you never wanted, or purchases what you told it just to get the price of

So I tried something new: checkpoint agents

The initial agent has complete context of what needs to be done. And that input is already cached

Fork the session where it is. Send the fork ahead to do the task and it will do exactly what the main agent would have done; their context is identical

What is even better is when the fork finishes, the cache of the main agent is kept warm by the subagent (they share the same prefix)

I measured it on a 137k-token session with Opus 5.5:
→ Main agent does it on its own: 67 s, $0.38, context +8-17k
→ Checkpoint: 117 s, $0.68, context +2k
→ Classic subagent: 123 s, $0.57, context +4-5k

But here is what I found: avoiding large input is even more important than keeping cache. And most subagent tasks were done better either in series with retrieval, or split up to be parallel over fresh sessions from the start

I do not think there is a place for subagent delegation at all. There should either be a super-agent that orchestrates and does no work, or a long running agent that can retrieve from previous sessions, not a worker that completes tasks partially and delegates the rest to other workers

Don't design harnesses based on our assumptions of human behavior