Tip: Apply the Write/Select/Compress/Isolate Context Taxonomy Per Subagent

Sourcegraph·medium signal

Treat context as infrastructure using Lance Martin's four-move taxonomy: write (author instructions), select (retrieve only relevant context), compress (cut token waste), and isolate (keep unrelated context separate). In practice, dispatch token-heavy operations — large-file reads, log grinding — into a subagent so the root agent's valuable context survives, and reserve the root's tokens for reasoning it can't delegate. This is the concrete rule behind why subagents beat one bloated context window.