Subagent detail view footer shows the parent session's model, not the agent's actual model
Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jul 2, 2026 by Milkdog
Bug
When navigating to a background subagent's detail view, the footer displays the parent session's model rather than the model actually serving the subagent.
Repro / evidence
- Main session running on
claude-fable-5. - Dispatched subagents via the Agent tool with explicit model overrides (
sonnet,haiku). - The subagent detail view footer showed "Fable 5" for these agents.
- Ground truth from the subagent transcript JSONL (
tasks/<agentId>.output): every request line records e.g."model":"claude-sonnet-5"(orclaude-haiku-4-5-20251001for the haiku dispatch) — the override was honored; only the footer is wrong. - Also reproduced with the model param omitted: transcript shows
claude-sonnet-5(the general-purpose default), footer still shows the session model.
Impact
Misleads users auditing model selection/cost. In our case it twice triggered false alarms that expensive top-tier models were serving mechanical tasks (and once led the assistant itself to wrongly "confess" to a dispatch mistake based on the footer). Transcript grep is currently the only reliable way to see a subagent's real model.
Expected
Footer should show the model recorded in the subagent's own transcript (or show both: "agent: sonnet-5 · session: fable-5").
Environment
Claude Code 2.1.198, macOS (darwin 27.0.0).