Keep Subagents to 3 or 4
MurrLincoln · x · 2026-07-14
The author argues that in their use cases, 3 to 4 subagents are generally enough; adding more rarely brings noticeable performance gains. Instead, excessive subagents can cause memory pressure and swapping on Macs, especially when running many sessions simultaneously.
The quoted section adds troubleshooting context: using system tools to map the entire process tree, they found and cleared numerous redundant items, including stale dev servers, duplicate MCP servers, headless browsers, login items, VPN/network extensions, browser helpers, and various updaters. After cleaning up and restarting, stuttering during long-term multi-agent workloads dropped significantly.
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