I had eight custom agents defined in Claude Code. When I finally counted, seven of them hadn't been called once in the last 30 days. What keeps my ¥1.2M/month automation setup running isn't clever prompting. It's an environment that keeps checking, automatically, whether the things I built are actually doing anything.

Why this setup works

Claude Code lets you define custom agents by dropping .md files into the ~/.claude/agents/ directory. You define specialists like architect (architecture design), code-reviewer (code review), and security-reviewer (security audits), and expect Claude Code to pick the right one on its own. It's a natural assumption.

But when you actually tally the logs, the results are surprising.

Take my environment as an example. ~/.claude/agents/ currently holds eight agent definition files.