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Choose by where the work lives. Subagents fit when you are inside that one session and want to hand parts of a task to specialised assistants with their own tools and prompts. Pick Obversa when the work needs more than one family of agent, a review that sends work back with findings, a person who decides, and a record you can read after the run. Claude Code’s own words: “Subagents are specialized AI assistants that handle specific types of tasks.” A subagent is a markdown file with a name, a description, its tools and its model. It runs inside your Claude Code session, under the session’s permission mode, and its transcript is kept on disk so it can be resumed. The model is one of the Claude family. Here is the shape Obversa is for, as one file:

Side by side

Where Claude Code subagents win

  • You are already in Claude Code and the task is one session’s work.
  • The permission checks at every tool call are the safety net you want, with nothing more to install.
  • One model family is enough.

Where Obversa wins

  • A review should come from a different family than the one that wrote the work.
  • The process, reviews and returns included, should be a file under version control, and the run a record beside it.
  • The last word should be a person’s, asked as a step.

Where to go

A feature team, as a file for the file above with its recorded run; what is a meta-harness for the layer Obversa is.