Background job main session missing skills listing system-reminder (its subagents receive it)
Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Aug 17, 2026
Summary
A background job's main session does not receive the available-skills listing system-reminder, while subagents spawned from that same session do receive the full listing. Since the harness instructs the model to "only use skills listed in the user-invocable skills section — don't guess", the background-job main session effectively cannot discover or invoke any user/project skills.
Environment
- Claude Code v2.1.233
- macOS (darwin 25.5.0), zsh
- Session type: background job started from the agents (FleetView) interface, cwd inside a git repo
- Skills present: ~30 personal skills in
~/.claude/skills/(each with valid SKILL.md frontmatter) + 1 project skill in<repo>/.claude/skills/
Observed
- In the background job's main session, no system-reminder containing an available-skills listing ever appeared (verified across the full un-summarized conversation; deferred-tools listing and agent-types listing did appear).
- A
general-purposesubagent spawned from that same session, asked to report verbatim what it sees in its own context (tools forbidden), reported a complete skills listing with all ~48 entries (personal + project + built-in skills). - Consequence: the main session produced an HTML deliverable without loading the user's
html-effectivenessskill (which encodes the user's binding page conventions and whose description matches the task), because it had no way to know the skill existed.
Expected
Background-job main sessions should receive the same available-skills listing as interactive sessions and subagents.
Repro sketch
- Have personal skills in
~/.claude/skills/. - Start a session as a background job from the agents interface.
- Ask the main session to list, without using tools, the skills listing visible in its context → none.
- Have it spawn a subagent with the same question → full listing.