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O11 — Subagents and background jobs

Status: design stub. Back to the component map.

Purpose

Navigate related agents and long-running work, see their messages/results, and make the effect of wait, interrupt, cancel and terminate understandable.

Existing foundation

HP work integration qualifies shared-core children and jobs; the parity inventory records native differences and remaining gates.

Proposed boundary

An agent tree, a fork lineage and job ownership are different relationships. Interrupting a parent need not stop its children or jobs. Cancelling an observer's wait need not cancel the producer. Cross-provider delegation is a later orchestrator operation, not an existing native subagent promise.

Inputs and outputs: Related session identities, mailbox events and job snapshots/history → tree/list views, progress, inspection and explicitly scoped actions.

Candidate progression

  • Mock: A parent waiting on two children, a completed child with queued mail, a continuing background job and a cancelled waiter.
  • First usable slice: Open a child, inspect job output, wait/cancel independently and return to the parent through one qualified backend.
  • Later: Large families, aggregated progress, cross-provider task relationships and reusable ownership visualizations.

These are discussion candidates, not scheduled work or implemented capabilities.

Runtime lifetime finding — 19 October 2026

Codex’s ordinary idle-unload test does not count retained managed terminals; shutdown terminates them. Active turns and pending interactive requests prevent normal timed unloading, while V2 children have additional retention/eviction rules. Before a live background-work slice, discuss whether our coordinator should retain a subscription, warn about impending unload, or offer a separate durable job owner. No policy is chosen by this research pass.

See Spike 056 for the versioned source investigation and probe boundaries.

Your additions

  • Should children be inline, in a tree, in separate tabs, or selectable among these?
  • How should the UI show the scope of stop actions and work that continues independently?

Additional requirements, examples and decisions: TBD with you.