Background explore agents take 140+ seconds and return after agent has already found answers

[mcodilla]

Describe the bug

The agent launched two background agents early in the investigation. Both took ~140 seconds to complete. By the time they returned results, the agent had already found most of the same information through direct grep/view calls. This consumed resources without meaningfully accelerating the investigation in this case

Affected version

GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.36

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Ask the agent to investigate a large codebase
2. Agent launches multiple background agents
3. Agent also starts direct investigation with grep/view
4. Observe explore agents complete after the direct investigation has progressed past the agents' scope

Expected behavior

The agent should either wait for agents before duplicating work, or cancel agents once the main thread has found the same info, or better calibrate when to use agents vs direct investigation based on complexity

Additional context

No response