Agents view shows parent session's model instead of subagent's actual model

Status Closed — duplicate
Reported on v2.1.231
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 1 comment · opened Aug 13, 2026 · closed Aug 20, 2026

Summary

The agents view labels spawned subagents with the parent session's model instead of the subagent's actual model. Subagents that verifiably run claude-sonnet-5 are displayed as "Fable" when the main session runs claude-fable-5.

Environment

  • Claude Code 2.1.231
  • macOS (darwin 25.6.0)
  • Main session model: claude-fable-5

Steps to reproduce

  1. Run a session on claude-fable-5.
  2. Ask Claude to make all subagents use Sonnet. In my case Claude both:
  • set env.CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL: "sonnet" in ~/.claude/settings.json, and
  • passed the explicit model: "sonnet" parameter on every subsequent Agent tool call.
  1. Let it spawn new subagents (general-purpose and Explore types both affected).
  2. Open the spawned agents in the agents view.

Expected

Agent rows show the model the subagent actually runs (claude-sonnet-5).

Actual

Agent rows show "Fable" (the parent session's model).

Ground truth from the subagent transcript JSONLs — every API call in the affected agents' transcripts is stamped with Sonnet, zero Fable calls, e.g.:

$ grep -o '"model":"[^"]*"' <task-output>.jsonl | sort | uniq -c
  45 "model":"claude-sonnet-5"

So this is display-only: the model override is honored at the API layer, but the UI label misreports it. Impact: users watching costs/model usage are misled into thinking their premium-tier model is being burned by subagents (I killed healthy Sonnet agents twice because of this label before we checked the transcripts).

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