Getting it into your agent
One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.
npx agentmods add agents/runnithan/claudex-setup/avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overheadgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/runnithan/claudex-setupWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/agents/runnithan/claudex-setup/avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overhead)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/runnithan/claudex-setup/avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overhead"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/runnithan/claudex-setup/avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overhead.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $0.00000 | $0.00322 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00000 | $0.00161 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00000 | $0.00064 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00032 |
Grade A, and why
avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overhead scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Avoid Role-Based Subagents for Coordination Tasks, Hub-Spoke Bottlenecks Emerge
TL;DR
Naming subagents 'designer' / 'backend' / 'tester' creates coordination overhead via the main agent; use agent teams for multi-role work instead.
Why it matters
Subagents cannot communicate with each other, everything routes through the main agent. If three role-based subagents each need to share state, the main agent must serialize and relay context between them. This bottleneck grows with the number of coordination messages needed and degrades the main agent's context. Agent teams solve this with direct messaging but at higher token cost.
How to apply
Use role-based subagents only for truly independent parallel work (e.g., five parallel competitive research agents that don't need to talk to each other). For work that requires coordination between roles (frontend needs to know what backend built), use agent teams or sequential single-session work. When you catch yourself having the main agent relay messages between subagents repeatedly, switch to an agent team or redesign the task to be parallelizable without coordination.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 4d ago First seen · 25 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A abd0c28b04be
avoid-role-based-subagents-coordination-overhead is an agent published in the GitHub repository runnithan/claudex-setup (1 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 322 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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