prompting-claude-opus-5 changedbuild-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-opus-5
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7878Delegate to a subagent only for large tasks that are genuinely independent and parallelizable, such as a wide multi-file investigation. Do not delegate work you can finish yourself in a handful of tool calls, and do not use subagents to verify or double-check your own work. If one subagent can complete the task, use one rather than several, and keep spawn counts low.
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81If your harness is Claude Code or the Claude Agent SDK, the deterministic caps are the `CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_SUBAGENT_SPAWN_DEPTH` and `CLAUDE_CODE_MAX_CONCURRENT_SUBAGENTS` environment variables and the SDK's `max_budget_usd` option. They require Claude Code 2.1.217 or later, so update a pinned SDK before pointing it at Claude Opus 5. Claude Code adds a delegation instruction of its own on Claude Opus 5 only when you use its `claude_code` system prompt preset; with a custom or omitted system prompt, add a delegation instruction such as the example in this section yourself. See [Cap subagent depth, concurrency, and spend](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/subagents#cap-subagent-depth-concurrency-and-spend) in the Agent SDK docs.
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8183## Self-correction
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8385Claude Opus 5 catches and fixes its own mistakes well without prompting. Avoid instructing re-checks it already performs ("double-check your answer," "re-verify before responding"); like verification instructions, these compound with the model's own behavior and add cost without improving results.
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