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spawn_agent hides root cause as "not found"; forward underlying I/O error to model #11999
Description
What version of Codex CLI is running?
codex-cli 0.102.0-alpha.4
What subscription do you have?
not applicable
Which model were you using?
No response
What platform is your computer?
No response
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
No response
What issue are you seeing?
Codex can't spawn subagents when inotifies are exhausted and doesn't forward error to model/user.
User-visible symptom
Agent spawned
└ call: call_xmnq4AwNgAiZ55mkavinJAF7
agent: not created
status: not found
I waited and retried; still blocked by agent thread limit reached (max 6).
If you can close/free one agent slot, I’ll launch it immediately.
Relevant logs (~/.codex/log/codex-tui.log)
2026-02-17T15:19:37.551413Z INFO ... ToolCall: spawn_agent ... thread_id=019c68ae-0475-7c63-a751-
382f2d5cc2cc
2026-02-17T15:20:54.162653Z INFO ... ToolCall: spawn_agent ... thread_id=019c68ae-0475-7c63-a751-
382f2d5cc2cc
2026-02-17T15:21:55.660754Z WARN codex_core::thread_manager: failed to initialize file watcher:
No file descriptors available (os error 24)
2026-02-17T15:22:22.695504Z WARN codex_core::thread_manager: failed to initialize file watcher:
No file descriptors available (os error 24)
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Exhaust inotify watchers, get opaque error instead of actionable out of inotify close something or bump limit
What is the expected behavior?
No response
Additional information
019c68ae-0475-7c63-a751-382f2d5cc2cc
Activity
0xdeafbeef commentedon Feb 17, 2026
In my case it was exhaustion of
fs.inotify.max_user_instanceswhile were not fully usedinotify.max_user_watchesjif-oai commentedon Feb 18, 2026
#12105
0xdeafbeef commentedon Feb 18, 2026
Also would be nice to forward real io errors to agent to make situations when some resource is exhausted / something is broken easier to debug
jif-oai commentedon Feb 18, 2026
@0xdeafbeef actually I thought about it and I think we should forward the error to the user but not the agent. Otherwise the agent might try to solve it itself by just closing random
inotify. In general I prefer give only the relevant context to the agent to prevent it from trying random stuff