Skip to content

agentop timeline shows workflow subagents as 'subagent <id>' #1756

Closed

Description

@huang195

Problem

When Claude Code's Workflow tool starts subagents, the agentop timeline pane labels each one subagent <id>. Subagents that the Agent tool starts show their description, for example "Implement Task 3: SSE and decode".

Seen on session f3cff1d8-c329-4b45-b03e-f6041bec8187 (25 workflow agents, all unlabeled).

Cause

  1. The timeline takes a subagent's label from the Agent tool call on the wire (core/session/timeline/agents.go, the spawn.desc match). A workflow starts its agents inside Claude Code, so no such call goes over the wire.
  2. Claude Code still writes each label to disk, in <session>/subagents/workflows/<run>/agent-<id>.meta.json ("description": "merge T2"). readSubagents in core/observe/claude/harvest.go reads only <session>/subagents/agent-*.meta.json, one level up.
  3. Only the events pane uses harvested labels (cmd/agentop/tui/events_blocks.go subagentLabel). The timeline pane does not.
  4. The incremental harvest skips a session when its main transcript did not change. During a workflow run, the main transcript stays almost unchanged, so new labels do not arrive while the run is live.

Fix

  1. readSubagents also reads subagents/workflows/*/agent-*.meta.json.
  2. An incremental harvest that skips a transcript still re-reads that session's meta files. They are small.
  3. The timeline pane uses the harvested description for a subagent that has no spawn call on the wire.
  4. The timeline pane asks for a harvest when it shows a subagent with no label, at most once per 15 s.

Activity

  1. self-assigned this
    on Nov 9, 2026
  2. added a commit that references this issue on Nov 9, 2026
    eafc90b
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

No labels
No labels

Type

No type

Projects

Milestone

No milestone

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions