Subtask
One small, self-contained piece of a larger job — concrete enough to just do.
Think of it like
A single line on the grocery list: “buy eggs.” Not the whole dinner, just one clear errand.
Example
Within “write the report,” a subtask is “summarize the Q3 sales figures” — small, clear, and done when it’s done.
How it actually works
Subtasks are what decomposition produces: units of work scoped tightly enough that an agent can complete one without holding the whole project in mind. Their independence is what enables parallelism and clean delegation. The art is sizing them — too big and they’re just the original problem again; too small and coordinating the swarm costs more than the work saved.
For product teams
The right-sized unit of agent work — big enough to matter, small enough to finish.
For engineers
A scoped unit of work produced by decomposition, executable independently and composable into the goal.
Related
- Task Decomposition — The process that creates subtasks.
- Worker Agent — The agent that typically executes one.
- Subgoal — An even finer target within a subtask.
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