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GPT-5 not able to trigger subagents consistently #2130
Description
I’ve been experimenting with using GPT-5 as my primary agent for the past few days, and I’ve noticed that it can successfully trigger the sub-agent call when instructed to do so immediately.
However, when I asked it to collaborate with a sub-agent in a feedback loop (where GPT-5 provides feedback and instructions, and the sub-agent (sonnet/opus) implements the feedback), it fails to call them properly in subsequent iterations.
It ends up responding like this.
... (copilot summarizing things for my context)
Action for @engineer: Please revise the plan accordingly
• Update constants and mapping as per points 1 and 3.
• Clarify TerminalIO boundary and ensure handle actuals do not live in platform modules, or switch to API-constructed handles with TerminalIO only writing sequences.
• Adjust FocusEvent to minimal shape unless hierarchy requires rawBytes.
• Fix debug hook signature to carry structured fields.
• Trim constants to only those used now.
• Expand doc diffs with explicit mapping table and gating policy.
Once you return with the corrected plan, I’ll re-review. If it passes, we greenlight implementation of P0/P1 and then move to the next task (P2 cursor style).
I am not sure if its a GPT-5 problem or if it has anything to do with Opencode at all, but just wanted to get some clarity if I am doing something wrong or is it a known problem.
Note: I am using GPT-5 from GitHub Copilot.
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github-actions commentedon Aug 21, 2025
This issue might be a duplicate of existing issues. Please check:
Feel free to ignore if none of these address your specific case.
rekram1-node commentedon Aug 21, 2025
this is basically a prompting issue, can you share some of your subagent names / descriptions?
We can try to solve on our end but I think you will have best results if you prompt more specifically for your use case. If you drop your agents here I can help w/ prompting potentially
static-var commentedon Aug 21, 2025
@rekram1-node the main agent is called
chef, the subagent name isengineerI usually address it as@engineer. I have tried it with another agent named@kotlin-engineeras well.I was getting issue with prompts like this.
rekram1-node commentedon Aug 21, 2025
interesting, I will try to play around w/ it more haven't used the subagents heavily yet
static-var commentedon Aug 21, 2025
Awesome, let me know if you need any more info or context around this.
Cyb3rDudu commentedon Aug 31, 2025
I have similar issues with my orchestrator agent running with gemini 2.5 pro (openrouter)
sometimes it is not able to spawn my coder agents (antropic/claude or opencode/grok)
what kind of info can I provide to debug this problem
rekram1-node commentedon Aug 31, 2025
well what do you mean by not able to spawn subagents?
for starters Id say gemini model’s arent the best at tool calling so they may need special prompting to behave better
rekram1-node commentedon Dec 28, 2025
[automated] Closing due to 90+ days of inactivity. Feel free to reopen if you still need this!