Sub-agent for long running tasks saved me 60% weekly burn rate

A developer utilized a sub-agent with Claude to autonomously process terabytes of data, significantly reducing their weekly burn rate by 60%. This setup involves dozens of sub-agents managing long-running processes, from 5 minutes to several hours. A heartbeat script, pinging every 45 minutes, maintains a warm 1-hour cache during extended tool calls, preventing costly context re-writes that would occur with the default 5-minute TTL. While this method slightly increases token usage, it optimizes how charges are incurred.