> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.nemu.cc/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Subagents

> Parallel workers the agent hands pieces of a task to

When a task splits into independent pieces, the agent hands them to subagents
and works on something else while they run. Each one is a separate job with its
own step budget, so a research pass and a repository read can happen at the same
time rather than one after the other.

## The kinds

| Kind     | What it does                                                                 |
| -------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Research | Searches the web, reads pages, returns an answer with its sources            |
| GitHub   | Maps a repository, reads the files that matter, returns a structured summary |
| Build    | Drafts a long document section by section, so it does not run out of room    |
| Custom   | Runs one of [your own saved agents](/chat/agents)                            |

Research runs shallow or deep. Deep spends more steps and reads more pages.
GitHub reads at most 15 files, chosen for relevance rather than crawling
everything.

## Running in parallel

By default two run at once. Fast mode raises that to five, Max mode to four, and
attaching a Computer raises it to five as well. The agent can change it for a
chat if a task genuinely fans out, up to ten.

Guards exist so a loop cannot run away: at most 48 subagents per turn, at most
eight left running in the background at any moment, and a kind that fails three
times in a row is not tried again.

Each subagent gets 32 minutes.

## Watching them

A subagent appears as a card in the conversation rather than a bare tool call,
showing how many actions it has taken and how many tokens it has used. Open it
and you get the task it was given, a live activity timeline, any files it
touched, and its result or its error.

The details panel on a message counts subagents dispatched, web research done
and pages read.

## Background subagents

The agent can start a subagent, carry on with something else, and collect the
result later. That is what lets it fire three research questions at once and
then write one answer from all three.

You do not manage this. It is worth knowing about because it explains why the
agent sometimes says it is waiting on something.