Bug: delegate mode breaks agent teams — teammates inherit restricted tool access

Summary

Delegate mode (Shift+Tab) is incompatible with agent teams. When the lead enables delegate mode, all spawned teammates inherit the restricted permission settings, losing access to file system tools (Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep). This makes it impossible for any teammate to do meaningful work.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Enable agent teams (CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1)
2. Start a session and create an agent team
3. Enable delegate mode (Shift+Tab)
4. Spawn a teammate with feature-dev:code-implementer (or any agent type that needs file tools)
5. The teammate reports it has no file system tools and cannot read or write files

Expected Behavior

Delegate mode should restrict only the lead's tool access (coordination-only tools), while spawned teammates retain the full tool set declared in their agent definitions. The purpose of delegate mode is to prevent the lead from doing work itself — not to prevent teammates from doing their assigned work.

Actual Behavior

Teammates inherit the lead's delegate mode restrictions. All spawned agents — regardless of subagent_type — are limited to coordination-only tools (SendMessage, TaskUpdate, TaskList, TaskGet). File tools declared in agent definitions (Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Glob, Grep) are not available.

Spawning replacements with different agent types (including general-purpose) does not help — the restriction is permission-based, not agent-type-based.

Evidence from Real Session

Tested with the bundled feature-dev plugin during a 7-phase feature development workflow. Five separate agent spawns all failed:

@impl-foundation (feature-dev:code-implementer) → "No file system tools available"
@impl-modifications (feature-dev:code-implementer) → "Blocked: no file tools"
@impl-foundation-2 (feature-dev:code-implementer) → "File/shell tools unavailable"
@writer-foundation (general-purpose) → "Cannot proceed - no file system tools available"
@writer-modifications (general-purpose) → "Need file system tools"

The lead correctly identified the root cause:

"delegate mode restricts all team member agents to task/messaging tools only"

Root Cause

The agent teams documentation states:

"Teammates start with the lead's permission settings."

Delegate mode sets the lead's permissions to coordination-only tools. Since teammates inherit this, they get the same restriction.

Impact

This affects every phase of any agent team workflow that requires teammates to access files:

• Exploration: Explorers need Read, Glob, Grep to analyze the codebase
• Architecture: Architects need Read, Glob, Grep to verify patterns
• Implementation: Implementers need Read, Edit, Write, Bash to write code
• Review: Reviewers need Read, Bash to review code and run tests

Delegate mode is effectively unusable with agent teams in its current form.

Suggested Fix

Either:

1. Don't propagate delegate mode to teammates — restrict only the lead's tools, letting teammates use their full declared tool sets
2. Allow per-teammate permission overrides at spawn time — the Task tool could accept a mode parameter that overrides the inherited permissions
3. Document the incompatibility — at minimum, warn users that delegate mode and agent teams don't work together

Option 1 seems most aligned with delegate mode's intent: it was designed to keep the lead focused on orchestration, not to restrict the entire team.

Environment

• Claude Code with agent teams enabled
• Delegate mode activated via Shift+Tab
• Tested with both plugin-defined agent types and general-purpose