Background task notifications should say what triggered the run (original completion vs user-message resume)
Status Open
Reported on v2.1.224
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments Β· opened Aug 8, 2026
π€ Generated with Claude Code
Problem
An orchestrator has no way to tell a user-initiated subagent continuation from a rogue self-continuation. In a real incident, an orchestrator repeatedly misread the user's direct messages to a subagent as the subagent continuing on its own β and once acted against the user's actual instruction because of it.
The notification's own <note> states the ambiguity without resolving it:
The user can send it another message and resume it, so the same task-id may notify more than once.
Proposal
Include a trigger element in the notification body, e.g.:
<trigger>first stop of the original run; nothing was delivered to this agent after launch</trigger>
<trigger>this run was triggered by a user message sent directly to this agent: "β¦"</trigger>
We run this as a local binary patch (ahalekelly/claude-patching, task-notification-provenance) and it removed the failure mode.
Version
Observed on 2.1.224 (macOS, native install).