Module 2 · Composition and control · Lesson 4

Skills and subagents

Package procedures as skills the model loads on demand, delegate specialist work to subagents with isolated context, and reason precisely about what crosses each boundary, in Claude Code and in eve.

70 min 1 video 3 exercises 7-question quiz Answers

Setup for the exercises:Install Claude Code Node.js, pnpm and TypeScript Durable agents with eve Get an OpenRouter key Local models with Ollama

By the end of this lesson you can

Write a skill whose description reliably triggers it, and explain progressive disclosure in terms of what is in context at each stage
Define the same specialist subagent in Claude Code, the Agent SDK and eve, and state what each one inherits from its parent
Decide between a skill, a subagent and a plain tool for a given task, using explicit criteria
Compute when delegating to subagents saves tokens and when it costs more
Identify what data crosses a delegation boundary and why delegation is not an approval boundary

An enquiries agent needs two very different kinds of help. It needs know-how: the rules for which additional enquiries a buyer's conveyancer may raise, the house format for an enquiry, the checklist for a drainage search. And it needs labour: someone to read a 40-page local authority search carefully and come back with three findings, without the agent's own context filling up with every page. Agent harnesses give you a tool for each. A skill packages know-how so the model loads it only when needed. A subagent takes a piece of work into a fresh context and returns a result. This lesson builds both, in Claude Code and in eve, and is precise about the boundaries between them.

Skills and subagents

Package procedures as skills the model loads on demand, delegate specialist work to subagents with isolated context, and reason precisely about what crosses each boundary, in Claude Code and in eve.

Skills and subagents

Skills and subagents

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