[DOCS] agent-teams Limitations: /rewind does preserve in-process teammates, contradicting the documented claim

Documentation Type

Incorrect/outdated documentation

Documentation Location

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams (§ Limitations)

Section/Topic

Limitations → "No session resumption with in-process teammates"

Current Documentation

The Limitations section states:

* No session resumption with in-process teammates: /resume and /rewind do not restore in-process teammates. After resuming a session, the lead may attempt to message teammates that no longer exist. If this happens, tell the lead to spawn new teammates.

Verified still present as written on 2026-08-28.

What's Wrong or Missing?

The /rewind half of this claim does not match observed behavior. On 2026-08-20, on Claude Code 2.1.238, a /rewind in a session with live in-process teammates left every teammate intact — busy, idle, and waiting alike. They remained addressable by name afterward and responded with their full prior context.

Two scoping notes, so the report is not read as broader than the evidence:

1. This report covers /rewind only. I have not run a controlled test of /resume against in-process teammates and make no claim about it here. If the two share an implementation, the same correction likely applies; if they do not, the bullet should probably be split rather than deleted.
2. The advice that follows the claim is also affected. "After resuming a session, the lead may attempt to message teammates that no longer exist... tell the lead to spawn new teammates" leads to the opposite of the right action after a rewind: re-spawning discards a teammate that is alive and holding context, and can collide with the original's worktree if it is mid-task.

I could find no CHANGELOG entry at any version pairing "teammate" with resume, rewind, or restore, so there is no public record of this being fixed after the page was written — which is why I am reporting it as an inaccuracy rather than as staleness relative to a known change.

The practical cost: teams built on this documentation treat a rewind as destructive to teammates and either avoid rewinding or discard live agents afterward. Both are expensive — a teammate carries accumulated exploration and review context that is costly to rebuild.

Suggested Improvement

If /rewind does preserve in-process teammates, split the bullet so each command carries its own accurate statement. Suggested text:

* No session resumption with in-process teammates: /resume does not restore in-process teammates. After resuming a session, the lead may attempt to message teammates that no longer exist. If this happens, tell the lead to spawn new teammates. /rewind is different: it preserves in-process teammates, which remain addressable by name with their context intact — do not spawn replacements after a rewind.

If instead the current text is correct and the observed behavior is the bug, the page is fine and the correction belongs in the implementation — in which case it would help to say explicitly that surviving teammates after a rewind are unsupported, since today the page reads as though they cannot survive at all.

Either way, stating what /rewind does independently of /resume would resolve the ambiguity.

Impact

Medium - Makes feature difficult to understand

Additional Context

• Observed on Claude Code 2.1.238 (2026-08-20); the documentation text re-verified unchanged on 2.1.247 (2026-08-28).
• Searched open issues before filing — nothing open reports this. #49978 quotes the same sentence but is a feature request about which agent Esc-to-rewind should target, not about the accuracy of the claim.
• Related closed docs issues on the same page for context: #70139, #72941, #69621, #70135.