[BUG] 437 subagents is probably too many

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet
• [x] This is a single bug report (please file separate reports for different bugs)
• [x] I am using the latest version of Claude Code

What's Wrong?

Requested Fable to review a codebase and make suggestions for optimizations. It suggested using one of the new ultra/workflows commands, so I agreed. It dispatched 14 review agents that returned 140 issues. It then spawned 140 adversarial agents in triplicate (420 total) to review from different angles. In <15 minutes it ate thru ~6M tokens before I caught it. After stopping, Fable found that it was the same 10 issues across all 14 reviewers and simply had not been deduplicated. About 1/6 of the reviews had finished, the others were still queued so I guess it would've been about 36M tokens total, for 10 issues.

<img width="3794" height="1918" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b548703f-33a9-4e82-98d0-c65f2a6d128f" />

<img width="3829" height="738" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ba8b6449-152b-4d4c-93b9-3a881e3608f2" />

What Should Happen?

What should happen? Probably a few less than 437 agents for 10 issues off a single prompt.

Error Messages/Logs

Steps to Reproduce

Unsure

Claude Model

Other

Is this a regression?

Yes, this worked in a previous version

Last Working Version

_No response_

Claude Code Version

2.1.174

Platform

Anthropic API

Operating System

Ubuntu/Debian Linux

Terminal/Shell

Other

Additional Information

_No response_