Bug Description
Agent-team teammates silently ignore the effort frontmatter from their subagent definition
effort is a documented, supported subagent frontmatter field (sub-agents doc: "Effort level when this subagent is active. Overrides the session effort level."). It works when the definition runs as a plain subagent via the Agent/Task tool.
But when the same definition is spawned as a teammate in an experimental agent team (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1), the effort field is silently dropped — the teammate inherits the lead's session effort instead. No warning is shown. The agent-teams doc says teammates honor a definition's tools and model and explicitly lists skills/mcpServers as not applied, but never mentions effort, so this is both a behavior gap and a doc gap.
This defeats the main reason to use agent teams for delegation: routing tasks to different models and effort tiers. model crosses over correctly; effort does not. The only workaround is manually /effort-ing each teammate after spawn, which isn't declarative and doesn't scale.
Repro:
- Define ~/.claude/agents/planner.md with model: opus, effort: max.
- Run the lead session at a low effort (e.g. /effort low).
- Spawn a teammate from the planner definition.
- Observed: teammate runs at the lead's low effort. Expected: max from its frontmatter (as it would as a plain subagent).
Ask: either honor effort on the teammate path (consistent with model), or if intentional, document it as unsupported like skills/mcpServers and warn on spawn. Related closed issues: #25591, #65598, #30703 and #64706
Environment Info
- Platform: linux
- Terminal: windows-terminal
- Version: 2.1.218
- Feedback ID: 18f10718-9b33-4da8-9eaf-3e5c1bca9f42
Bug Description
Agent-team teammates silently ignore the effort frontmatter from their subagent definition
effort is a documented, supported subagent frontmatter field (sub-agents doc: "Effort level when this subagent is active. Overrides the session effort level."). It works when the definition runs as a plain subagent via the Agent/Task tool.
But when the same definition is spawned as a teammate in an experimental agent team (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1), the effort field is silently dropped — the teammate inherits the lead's session effort instead. No warning is shown. The agent-teams doc says teammates honor a definition's tools and model and explicitly lists skills/mcpServers as not applied, but never mentions effort, so this is both a behavior gap and a doc gap.
This defeats the main reason to use agent teams for delegation: routing tasks to different models and effort tiers. model crosses over correctly; effort does not. The only workaround is manually /effort-ing each teammate after spawn, which isn't declarative and doesn't scale.
Repro:
Ask: either honor effort on the teammate path (consistent with model), or if intentional, document it as unsupported like skills/mcpServers and warn on spawn. Related closed issues: #25591, #65598, #30703 and #64706
Environment Info