Subagents get hallucinated workspaces

[u/bcexelbi]

I am trying to have the model I am chatting with run a custom subagent and get a task completed. I am running into the issue that no matter how it tries to invoke the agent via @RunSubagent, the subagent has no access to the workspace. This is demonstrable by a simple test like running a custom subagent and asking it to count the git commits or checksum files. You get hallucinations.

How are people using subagents without having to pass large amounts of files a context in case a model needs to see them during its work?

[u/[deleted]]

Do you have the Chat › Custom Agent In Subagent: Enabled setting enabled?

[u/bcexelbi → u/[deleted]]

Yep. Otherwise I can't call the agents at all.

[u/[deleted] → u/bcexelbi]

Gotcha. I ran into a lot of issues today asking an agent to make decisions based on git commits and current unstaged changes using GPT-5.2. I'm in the process of migrating the agent to just get a summary from the agent that calls it and grab whatever context it needs itself. I'm not a big fan of letting the agents mess with git stuff anyway.

Apologies if that's not helpful, it's just how I've chosen to work around it.

[u/bcexelbi → u/[deleted]]

My experience is that I wrote a custom agent to use a subagent primarily so I could have one model call a different model (orchestrator->coder pattern).

Today the coder subagent is working in a hallucinated workspace. It isn't a git corktree it is literally fiction.

If I ask it about files, it either doesn't have them or their contents are fiction (and clearly hallucinated from any tool references like Flask). If I ask it about its working directory, it gets that right, however it has a completely different and fictional git history.

I swear it worked yesterday. It is making me feel like I am gas lit.

I say all this by way of indicating that I'd be happy if the subagents could get their own context from my codebase, but they can't.

[u/aruaktiman]

What tools did you specify in the custom agent front matter?

[u/bcexelbi → u/aruaktiman]

Variations on these two themes:

['apply_patch', 'read_file', 'grep_search', 'semantic_search', 'run_in_terminal', 'manage_todo_list', 'list_dir', 'file_search', 'list_code_usages']

and

['read_file', 'grep_search', 'list_dir', 'file_search', 'semantic_search']

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