Subagent review requests are not clearly surfaced in the main thread

[rafaself]

What version of the IDE extension are you using?

26.506.31421

What subscription do you have?

Plus

Which IDE are you using?

VS Code

What platform is your computer?

Linux 7.0.4-100.fc43.x86_64 x86_64

What issue are you seeing?

When the subagent is waiting for an instruction or for a question to be answered, the user is not always clearly notified in the main thread. However, after opening the subagent thread for the first time and then returning to the main thread, the question starts appearing there, in the main thread, for subsequent interactions.

Sometimes, you may wait for a long time thinking the subagent is still running, while the required-review notification is not clear enough in the first time.

I ran a brief example:

Main thread

Subagent thread

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Start a thread asking the agent to spawn a subagent with instructions to run a command that will likely require your review. Example: docker ps.

What is the expected behavior?

There are a few ways to make the notification clearer:

• Always expand the subagent details wrapper attached to the composer.
• Always show the question in the main thread, with clear information about which subagent is asking it. When multiple subagents require input, this could be shown as a multi-step question flow.

Additional information

No response

[joecklau]

I also got same blocking UI.
To test / reproduce it, I tried in Codex App, Codex CLI and Codex VS Extension respectively for some action generally requiring approval.
The result is that:

• Codex CLI is fine, Codex CLI will prompt the approval request when the subagent is asking for approval
• Codex App and Codex VS extension main thread is blocked just like what you shown. User will never know the subagent is being blocked by approval request as it is not prompted in UI, and the main thread will just keep waiting until timeout. User will see the prompt only when the user is suddenly interested in what a specific subagent is doing, but usually user will just wait without checking every subagent.