Team agents in tmux panes start in interactive mode instead of autonomous agent mode

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Feb 5, 2026 by sbruhat Closed Feb 5, 2026

Bug Description

When spawning team agents via the Task tool with team_name parameter, Claude Code correctly opens tmux panes and launches new instances with agent flags, but the agents start in interactive mode (showing prompt) instead of consuming their inbox messages and running autonomously.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Create a team with Teammate tool (spawnTeam)
  2. Create tasks with TaskCreate
  3. Spawn agents with Task tool using team_name and name parameters
  4. Observe the tmux panes

Expected Behavior

Agents should automatically read their inbox messages and start executing their assigned tasks in autonomous mode.

Actual Behavior

  • Tmux panes open correctly
  • Claude Code instances launch with correct flags (--agent-id, --agent-name, --team-name, --parent-session-id, --agent-type, etc.)
  • Agents start in interactive mode showing the prompt (e.g., ❯ Try "edit page.tsx to...")
  • They never transition to autonomous agent mode
  • Inbox messages remain read: false
  • tmux send-keys can display text in the pane but Claude Code does not process it

Example Command Launched in Tmux Pane

cd /path/to/project && CLAUDECODE=1 /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/claude-code/2.1.32/claude \
  --agent-id agent-backend@tmux-test \
  --agent-name agent-backend \
  --team-name tmux-test \
  --agent-color blue \
  --parent-session-id <session-id> \
  --agent-type general-purpose \
  --dangerously-skip-permissions \
  --model haiku

Observations

  • Tested with both general-purpose and Bash agent types — same behavior
  • Tested with haiku model
  • SendMessage successfully writes to inbox files, but agents don't poll them
  • shutdown_request messages are also ignored
  • tmux send-keys + Enter displays text in the pane but the input is not processed by Claude Code's interactive prompt

Environment

  • Claude Code version: 2.1.32
  • Platform: macOS (Darwin 25.2.0, arm64)
  • Node.js: v25.2.1
  • tmux: installed via Homebrew
  • Shell: zsh

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