[BUG] Agent Teams: a teammate in its own iTerm2/tmux pane shows "manual mode" and a timer that never stops in the lead's teammate view
Status Open
Reported on v2.1.284
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 0 comments · opened Oct 1, 2026
What's wrong?
When a teammate runs in its own terminal pane (teammateMode resolves to the iTerm2 or tmux backend), switching to it in the lead (Viewing @<name>) shows state that is wrong and never updates:
- Wrong permission mode. The footer says
manual mode on, although the teammate process was launched with--permission-mode autoand its own pane showsauto mode on. - The timer never stops. The spinner and the task row keep counting (
Pouncing… (8m 0s)) after the teammate has finished its turn and sent itsidle_notification. The teammate's own pane showsdone. - The view is empty apart from the spawn prompt (related to #82687 and #98550, but with a different cause; see below).
Cause (read from the 2.1.284 bundle)
For a pane teammate, the lead registers an in_process_teammate task record once, at spawn, with hard-coded values:
permissionMode: planModeRequired ? "plan" : "default",
isIdle: false,
"default"is shown as "Manual" in the mode table, whatever--permission-modewas passed to the pane process.isIdleis set totrueonly by the in-process runner, which never runs for a pane teammate, so the record stays "running" forever. Theidle_notificationthe lead receives does not update it.- No messages are ever added to the record, because the teammate's turns happen in another process. The view therefore shows only the spawn prompt.
This differs from #98550, where an in-process teammate's messages are in memory but trimmed to 50, and then to one message on completion. Fixing that would not help the pane case.
Expected
The lead's view of a pane teammate reflects the live process:
- the permission mode it was actually launched with,
- idle or working, using the
idle_notificationthe lead already receives, - either its transcript or a clear pointer to the pane that holds it.
Environment
Claude Code 2.1.284, macOS, iTerm2 split-pane backend, CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS=1.
Related: #98550, #82687, #75190