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You are building developer productivity tools using the Claude Agent SDK. The agent helps engineers explore unfamiliar codebases, understand legacy systems, generate boilerplate code, and automate repetitive tasks. It uses the built-in tools (Read, Write, Bash, Grep, Glob) and integrates with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
Your agent has spent 25 minutes exploring a game engine's rendering subsystem---reading shader code, buffer management, and frame synchronization logic. An engineer now asks it to understand how the physics engine integrates with rendering for collision debug overlays. You notice recent responses reference ''typical rendering patterns'' rather than the specific VulkanPipeline and FrameGraph classes it discovered earlier.
What's the most effective approach?
The reference to generic rendering patterns indicates that the current context has become saturated or that important earlier details are no longer receiving sufficient attention. Anthropic documents that performance can degrade as a Claude Code context window fills with conversation history, file contents, and command output; symptoms include forgetting earlier instructions and making less precise responses. (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices)
Option C preserves the high-value rendering discoveries while isolating the physics investigation. The summary should identify the relevant rendering classes, synchronization boundaries, debug-overlay interfaces, and unresolved integration questions. A physics-focused subagent can then inspect collision and simulation code in its own context without adding dozens of additional files to the already crowded main conversation.
This explicit summary matters because an ordinary named subagent starts with a fresh, isolated context and does not automatically receive the parent's full conversation history or previously read files. Claude constructs a delegation message containing the task context, so the essential rendering findings must be supplied deliberately. (https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents)
Option A omits the integration context needed to guide the physics search. Option B destroys useful prior analysis. Option D keeps expanding an already degraded context and treats the symptom rather than controlling context growth.
Official references/topics: Context-Window Management; Subagent Isolation; Delegation Summaries; Codebase Exploration.