Unclear Where in Claude Code's interface this list appears is not known.
What
A subagent is a helper agent that Claude starts to work on part of a task. Claude Code now has code to list subagents that have already finished in the current session, so you can look back at them.
- The history loader reads each subagent's transcript (its recorded conversation) and its
.meta.jsonsidecar file, which sits next to the transcript. It builds a parent and child tree from them and skips observer and taskKind entries. - Each row shows a label, an
@nameor the agent type, a "started …" time, a "last active …" time and a "stopped" marker. The group is labelled "Earlier in this session". - The Background dialog, which lists background tasks, builds a row of type
subagent_history. It shows a count, or "could not be read" when the history cannot be read. Selecting it expands intorecorded_agentrows for completed subagents, usingstoppedByUserandlastActivityAtfrom the live task when there is one. - The dialog lists the history even when no tasks are running. "No tasks currently running" now appears only when history rows are the only rows.
- A source-availability check that already returned false for
monitor_wsandself_managed_tasksnow also returns false forsubagent_historyandrecorded_agent. Those two kinds are handled elsewhere in the same part of the code. - The dream task detail view also gains a screen variant controlled by
isBackgroundDetailScreenEnabled.
The feature reports itself as "off" unless its switch is true. An environment variable is a named value set in your shell before starting a program. The switch is the environment variable CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_HISTORY. When that variable is not set, Claude Code falls back to the server-side flag tengu_rustling_crescent, whose built-in default in the code is false. Nothing has been read about that flag's actual value.
Why
Before this, finished subagents could not be reviewed from this dialog. This change lets you look back at what they did and when they stopped. Setting CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_HISTORY is the switch the code checks first.
tengu_rustling_crescent Not enough to sayNothing here resolved what this flag was doing on this version, so nothing here should be read as on or off.
This account: no value returned · anonymous baseline: no value returned · compiled default in v2.1.307: off
These values were read against a different version of Claude Code, so treat them as the nearest reading available instead of one taken on this release.
Read once, for one account on one subscription tier, against v2.1.307. It isn't a statement about your account. What a flag value here can and cannot tell you
Where in Claude Code's interface this list appears is not known.
New in this build: tengu_rustling_crescent