AI inference glossary
Agentic inference

Subagent

Also known as child agent, delegated agent

In plain English

A subagent is an additional agent started by a main agent to handle a smaller piece of the same task, sometimes at the same time as other work.

Technical definition

A subagent is a delegated agent execution with its own conversation state and model requests, connected to a parent session through task and dependency relationships.

Engineering details

The main agent can launch one or more subagents and later consume their results. Their requests may overlap with the parent or with each other, creating branches in the session graph. Each branch can grow a separate context while sharing some initial instructions or repository state.

Why it matters

Subagents make agent traffic less sequential. A serving stack may receive bursts of long-context requests from one user task, and scheduler decisions affect how quickly branches finish. Aggregate throughput can rise while an individual branch waits longer for service.

How to read it in InferenceX

AgentX preserves subagent branches from the trace-derived workload and replays their dependencies. Delegation quality is outside its scope. The benchmark measures how the inference system serves the resulting parallel requests, shared prefixes, and completion timing.