Claude Code nested subagents can stall forever when replies are routed to a role name
Jordan-Britt · ghdev · 2026-07-16
Claude Code nested subagents can stall forever when replies route to the wrong parent
A bug report against anthropics/claude-code says a grandchild background agent can complete its work but fail to deliver its result to the direct parent. The nested agents send SendMessage(to="general-purpose", ...), but general-purpose is only a role label, not a routable agent ID.
What happens
- A background agent spawns nested reviewer agents.
- The nested agents finish and try to reply upward.
- The message routing layer cannot resolve the parent by role name, so replies fall back to the top-level main session.
- The direct parent never receives the results it is waiting for and stalls indefinitely.
Environment
- Claude Code CLI with the Agent tool
- isolation: "worktree"
- Reproduced from a multi-level self-review workflow
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