[FEATURE] Show the actual model of each spawned subagent in the task/progress UI
Problem
When the main agent spawns subagents via the Agent tool (optionally with a model override), there is no way to see in the UI which model each subagent is actually running on — neither in the live progress/task list, nor in the completion notification.
Today the only way to verify is to grep the subagent transcript JSONL for the "model" field:
grep -o '"model":"[^"]*"' /tmp/claude-.../tasks/<id>.output | sort | uniq -c
This matters because model overrides are easy to get wrong silently (e.g. inheriting the parent session model instead of the requested one), and the cost difference between tiers is large. Users delegating work to cheaper/stronger models specifically want to confirm the delegation actually happened.
Proposed solution
Display the resolved model id (e.g. opus-4-8) next to each subagent in:
- the live background-task / progress view,
- the task completion summary,
- ideally also in the Agent tool result returned to the parent agent at launch time.
Context
Found while orchestrating parallel Opus subagents from a session running on a different model — verifying the override required manual transcript inspection.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
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3 Comments
Display the subagent model and effort in the list of running agents:
<img width="1703" height="163" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/df213e9d-01ea-4f8b-9767-6ffcffbf4cd0" />
It's invaluable for evaluating skills' underlying agents' model and and spawned subagets' models whether they comply with written instructions given in the prompt / skill / agent .md.
+1
@bcherny I think this is a super important feature, especially now that we have Fable.