Agent team teammates prompt for Read tool approval despite docs saying read-only tools require no approval

Resolved 💬 5 comments Opened Feb 6, 2026 by dmax1 Closed Mar 7, 2026

Bug Description

Teammates in agent teams prompt the user to approve Read tool access for every single teammate at startup. According to the permissions documentation, read-only tools (File reads, Grep) should require no approval.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Enable agent teams (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS: "1")
  2. Set teammateMode: "tmux" in settings.json
  3. Set lead to acceptEdits mode (via Shift+Tab) before spawning teammates
  4. Create a team and spawn multiple teammates (e.g., 7 teammates for different project directories)
  5. Each teammate reads their project's CLAUDE.md on startup

Expected Behavior

Read operations should be auto-approved without user prompts, as documented:

| Tool type | Example | Approval required |
|-----------|---------|-------------------|
| Read-only | File reads, Grep | No |

Actual Behavior

User is prompted to approve Read access for every single teammate individually. With 7 teammates, that's 7 separate approval prompts just for reading files.

Additional Context

  • The mode parameter passed to the Task tool when spawning teammates (e.g., mode: "acceptEdits") appears to be ignored. The docs confirm this: "you can't set per-teammate modes at spawn time" — teammates inherit the lead's mode.
  • Even after setting the lead to acceptEdits mode before spawning, Read prompts still appear for teammates.
  • All teammates have cwd set to the lead's directory (not their own working directory), which may be related.

Environment

  • macOS (Darwin 25.2.0)
  • Claude Code with agent teams experimental feature
  • teammateMode: "tmux"

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