paseo/docs/agent-lifecycle.md

Agent lifecycle

How an agent is created, runs, becomes a subagent, gets archived, and disappears from the UI. The model spans the daemon (lifecycle, archive) and the client (tabs, the subagents track).

States

initializing → idle → running → idle (or error → closed)
                 ↑        │
                 └────────┘  (agent completes a turn, awaits next prompt)

Each live agent in AgentManager carries a lastStatus of initializing, idle, running, or error. closed is the persisted, resumable state for an agent record that has no live provider runtime. State transitions persist to disk and stream to subscribed clients via WebSocket.

Runtime residency

An unarchived agent may be closed without being deleted or archived. Closing releases its provider processes and subscriptions while retaining its Paseo identity, persistence handle, timeline, workspace, labels, title, usage, attention, timestamps, and parent relationship. Opening or prompting the agent runs through ensureAgentLoaded(), which resumes the durable provider session under the same Paseo agent ID. Provider history is not appended again when the canonical timeline is already primed.

Idle agents remain resident indefinitely. Runtime closure happens only through an explicit lifecycle action such as archive, replacement, reload, workspace teardown, or daemon shutdown.

Cancellation

Cancellation changes lifecycle state only after the provider acknowledges the interrupt or emits a terminal turn event. If the interrupt is rejected or times out, the agent remains running with its active foreground turn intact. Follow-up actions such as replacement, reload, rewind, and Stop must report that failure instead of accepting work they cannot perform. Synthesizing a local cancellation without provider acknowledgment creates a split-brain session: Paseo accepts a new prompt while the provider still owns the previous foreground turn.

Relationships

Agents can launch other agents via the agent-scoped create_agent MCP tool. Agent-scoped creation is always asynchronous and always stamps paseo.parent-agent-id, pointing back at the caller. Omit workspaceId to use the caller's workspace, or pass an existing workspace ID returned by create_workspace. Placement never changes parentage.

• Subagents — exist as part of the creating agent's work, appear in that agent's subagent track, and are archived with it.
• Detached agents — stand on their own after an explicit detach transition, do not appear in the former parent's subagent track, and are not archived with it.

Runtime ownership is resolved from explicit workspace ID and caller context, never from cwd. Workspace creation is a separate operation with local | worktree isolation; agent creation only selects an existing workspace.

Users can also detach an existing subagent from the subagents track. Detach is deliberately a manual lifecycle gesture, not an agent-facing MCP tool. It removes the paseo.parent-agent-id label only: it does not stop, archive, move, or restart the agent. The agent keeps its current cwd and workspaceId, leaves the former parent's track, and behaves like a root agent for tab close, workspace activity, and future parent archive.

notifyOnFinish defaults to true for agent-scoped creation and background prompt follow-ups because most delegated work needs to report back to the creating agent. Set it to false only for truly fire-and-forget agents or prompts.

Provider-managed child agents

Some providers can create their own child sessions inside one provider runtime. OMP's task tool reports these with child_session events; AgentManager imports the live provider handle, stamps paseo.parent-agent-id, and surfaces the result as a normal subagent in the parent's subagents track.

The provider still owns the underlying runtime. Paseo keeps an agent record so the child can be opened, tracked, archived, and cascaded with the parent, but prompts and history hydration route through the provider adapter for that native child handle.

Archive

Archive is a soft delete: the agent record stays on disk with archivedAt set, the runtime is closed, and the agent disappears from active lists. Archive is global — it lives on the server and propagates to every connected client.

Archive sets archivedAt, invokes the provider's native archive hook, and cascades to managed children.

create_agent_request can opt an agent into autoArchive. In that mode the daemon archives the agent after the first terminal turn event (turn_completed, turn_failed, or turn_canceled). When the agent owns an isolated workspace, auto-archive archives that workspace too; the managed worktree is removed when its final workspace reference is gone.

Archiving runs through AgentManager.archiveAgent (packages/server/src/server/agent/agent-manager.ts):

1. Snapshot the current session into the registry
2. Set archivedAt and normalize lastStatus away from running/initializing
3. Notify subscribers
4. Close the runtime (kills the process if still running)
5. Cascade-archive children — any agent whose paseo.parent-agent-id label matches the archived agent gets archived too, recursively

Cascade is what keeps subagent fleets from outliving their orchestrator.

Workspace archive is a separate lifecycle. Archiving or removing a worktree can close a surviving agent record without setting the agent's archivedAt, while its workspaceId still points at the archived workspace. History navigation must not infer workspace lifecycle from agent.archivedAt or mutate either lifecycle. The workspace route asks the daemon for authoritative recovery state; only the route's explicit Unarchive or Restore action changes the archived workspace.

History navigation preserves the selected agent as an explicit recovery target. If both that agent and its workspace are archived, the workspace recovery action restores the workspace and unarchives the selected agent as one user action. Other archived agents in the restored workspace remain recoverable from History. Opening one pins its tab and renders the archived-agent callout. Authoritative timeline catch-up may load provider history with a runtime-only history resume purpose, which must leave both Paseo's archivedAt and the provider's native archive state unchanged. Unarchive remains the only transition back to an interactive runtime: it runs the provider's native unarchive hook (including Codex thread/unarchive) before the normal agent resume and timeline hydration flow.

Provider session connection owns every process it spawns until the session is registered with AgentManager. If initialization, persisted-session resume, or initial history hydration fails, connect() must dispose that process before rethrowing; the manager cannot clean up a session it never received.

Tabs vs archive

These are two distinct concepts that used to be conflated:

Concept	Scope	Triggers
Tab (workspace layout)	Per-client	User opens/closes a view
Archive (lifecycle)	Global	Explicit lifecycle gesture

Closing a tab on a root agent still archives — the tab is the agent's home, so closing it means "I'm done with this agent." A confirm dialog protects against archiving a running agent by accident.

Closing a tab on a subagent (any agent with parentAgentId) is layout-only. The agent stays unarchived and stays in its parent's track. The user can re-open the tab from the track at any time. This is implemented in handleCloseAgentTab (packages/app/src/screens/workspace/workspace-screen.tsx).

The asymmetry is intentional: a subagent's persistent relationship lives in the parent's track. Same-workspace subagents are not auto-opened as tabs; the user opens one from that track when needed. A cross-workspace subagent is also auto-opened as a tab in its own workspace so opening that workspace does not appear empty. It remains in the parent's track until it is actually detached.

Workspace activity

Agent lifecycle status stays literal: a parent agent is idle when its own turn is idle, even if a child is running.

Workspace status is an aggregate activity signal computed per workspaceId. Ownership is never derived from cwd — many workspaces may share one directory, and same-cwd siblings do not clump under one status. Root agents and cross-workspace subagents contribute their normal state bucket to their own workspace. Same-workspace descendants contribute running to the nearest ancestor in that workspace; their non-running attention, permission, and error states stay in the parent's subagents track. This makes a cross-workspace subagent behave like a detached agent for workspace visibility and status without removing its parent relationship.

The subagents track

The collapsible track above the composer in an agent's pane (packages/app/src/subagents/track.tsx) combines two kinds of children:

• Paseo subagents are full managed agents. Their membership rule (packages/app/src/subagents/select.ts) is:

parentAgentId === thisAgent.id  AND  !archivedAt

• Provider subagents are child executions owned by Claude, Codex, or OpenCode. They are not inserted into AgentManager as managed agents. Providers emit a separate descriptor and timeline stream through agent.provider_subagents.*; the client keeps that state outside the normal agent store and merges only the presentation rows into the track.

Clicking either kind opens a workspace tab. A Paseo subagent tab is a normal interactive agent pane. A provider subagent tab is a read-only timeline pane with no composer, archive, detach, rewind, or fork actions. Both panes use AgentStreamView, so message, reasoning, tool-call, and layout rendering stay identical.

Provider timelines use the same structural timeline item format but deliberately have a separate lifecycle and transport. A provider thread/session identifier is not a Paseo agent identifier, and closing its tab is always layout-only.

Provider descriptors may include one compact subtitle. The provider owns its contents and formatting; clients display and truncate it without interpreting provider-specific model, thinking, or usage fields.

Claude provider subagents: the task protocol

Claude Code announces subagent lifecycle on the SDK stream (task_started / task_updated / task_notification / task_progress), and Paseo reads those announcements rather than reconstructing them from sidechain frames. The live source (subagents/live-source.ts) and the replay source (subagents/replay-source.ts) both translate into one observation vocabulary (subagents/observation.ts), so a fact is derived once for both paths instead of once per path. Gotchas that are not obvious from the SDK types:

• Not every announced task is a subagent. A backgrounded shell announces as task_type: "local_bash" with a tool_use_id and no subagent_type; workflows announce as local_workflow; ambient housekeeping sets skip_transcript. Filtering on the presence of a tool_use_id alone puts sleep 20 in the subagents track.
• A task that was never declared gets no descriptor, by any route. Filtered tasks still emit task_notifications carrying a tool_use_id, and still emit frames carrying parent_tool_use_id. Attributing either produces a descriptor with no identity and a defaulted running status — a nameless row that never finishes. Status, presentation updates, and sidechain frames all route through the declaration table.
• Task ids are session-scoped, not turn-scoped. Cancelling a turn must not clear the routing table: a backgrounded child settles after the interrupt and needs its descriptor to still exist. Cancellation instead terminalizes the declared children that were running in the foreground, and a later task_notification is free to correct that guess. Backgrounded children are identified by task_updated.patch.is_backgrounded.
• Effort is only reachable through hooks. It appears nowhere on the message stream at any depth, and the level Paseo requests is not necessarily the level that runs — a model that does not support it is silently downgraded. A hook firing inside a subagent reports the active post-downgrade level next to its agent_id, which is the same id task_started calls task_id.
• Backgrounded subagents emit no frames carrying parent_tool_use_id at all. Everything keyed off that field sees nothing for one; they are visible only because the task protocol announces them.
• On replay, <session>/subagents/ holds every descendant, not just this session's children. agent-<id>.meta.json carries spawnDepth: 1 is a direct child, 2+ was spawned by another subagent and its toolUseId names a Task call made inside its parent's session, which nothing in this transcript can resolve. Replaying those adds rows the live stream never showed, each with no Task card and no recoverable outcome, so they render as running forever. One recorded session showed 10 subagents live and would have replayed 22.
• Replay totalTokens is a context-size reading, not cumulative spend. Claude Code finalizes a subagent by summing the last assistant message's usage block and shipping that as usage.total_tokens. Summing per-entry usage instead multiplies the cached prefix by the turn count and reports a number several times larger than the live path.

Archived Paseo subagents disappear from the track, by design. To remove one from the track without closing its tab, use the archive button on the row — it opens a confirm dialog and archives the subagent on confirm. Provider-owned rows have no individual Paseo lifecycle controls.

The track header's Archive finished action hides finished provider-owned rows in the current app session. Their native sessions and timelines are untouched, and managed Paseo subagents are not archived by this bulk action. If a hidden provider child starts running again, the app brings it back to the track.

To keep the agent alive but remove it from the parent's track, use detach. The daemon clears the parent label, emits the normal agent update, and every client reclassifies the agent from subagent to root/sibling from that updated snapshot.

Why this shape

The decision was to decouple "close tab" from "archive" only for subagents, rather than universally:

• Closing a tab on a root agent still archives — preserves the existing UX users are trained on
• Closing a tab on a subagent is layout-only — fixes the lossy "click to read, close to dismiss view, lose the row" flow
• Archive button on track rows — gives subagents an explicit lifecycle gesture in their home surface
• Detach button on track rows — lets a subagent continue independently without killing its work
• Cascade archive on parent — keeps subagents from leaking when the parent is archived

We considered universal decoupling (no tab close ever archives, archive is always explicit) but rejected it: it changes a behavior root-agent users rely on.

Limitations

Subagent accumulation under long-lived parents

A parent that spawns many subagents will see the track grow. Managed Paseo subagents can be archived individually. Finished provider-owned rows can be hidden together with Archive finished; this is app-local presentation state and resets when the app restarts.

Cross-client tab dismissal

Closing a subagent's tab on one client doesn't affect other clients' layouts. This is the expected behavior of decoupled tabs and is consistent with how layouts have always worked. Archive remains the global gesture for cross-client cleanup.

Storage

$PASEO_HOME/agents/{cwd-with-dashes}/{agent-id}.json

{cwd-with-dashes} is derived from the agent's filesystem cwd. It is not the workspace id; agent storage stays cwd-keyed while workspace identity is the opaque workspace id.

Each agent is a single JSON file. Fields relevant to this doc:

Field	Type	Meaning
id	string	Stable identifier
archivedAt	string?	Soft-delete timestamp (ISO 8601)
labels["paseo.parent-agent-id"]	string?	Parent agent ID, set automatically for agent-scoped creation and removed by detach
lastStatus	AgentStatus	initializing / idle / running / error / closed

See docs/data-model.md for the full agent record.