Claude Code's subagents solve the 'Lost in the Middle' problem by running investigations in isolated context windows. Instead of one agent accumulating thousands of tokens during a bug hunt, a subagent performs the work and returns only the insight. This keeps your main context clean for the actual fix.

The technique is powerful for complex tasks. A debugging session that would consume ~30,000 tokens in a single context instead adds just ~50. Built-in agents like Explore handle codebase analysis, while custom agents can be defined with specific tools and instructions in `.claude/agents/` files.

Best practices include scoping tools intentionally—read-only for research, full access for implementation—and defining clear completion criteria. Subagents can run in parallel for multi-option research, though each is a separate API call. The tradeoff is worth it for investigations exceeding ~1000 tokens, but not for simple, focused tasks.