Claude Code’s Sub-agents are not what the industry expects from “multi-agent orchestration”; they can only be considered a kind of multi-agent mechanism. Real multi-agent orchestration looks like this:
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Hierarchical and nested orchestration: supports a meta-orchestrator managing sub-orchestrators, forming a “team of teams” (hierarchical/swarm structure), and allowing complex delegation chains plus debate/review mechanisms.
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Multi-model/cross-provider support: different agents use different models (Opus for planning, Flash for execution, Grok for search), optimizing cost/performance.
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Shared state and advanced coordination: persistent memory, conflict resolution, dynamic routing, iterative loops, error recovery, all managed by external code or frameworks.
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True parallelism and scalability: supports dozens or even hundreds of agents running concurrently, suitable for long-running, large-scale tasks (such as full-stack application refactoring and enterprise automation).
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Open-source/programmatic flexibility: developers define workflows in code, rather than relying on a single LLM’s “natural-language delegation.”
So, Claude Code’s Sub-agents are “internal task routing + lightweight delegation,” not an independent multi-agent framework. It’s entry-level and only suitable for simple scenarios.