Background agent completion retention
- Dominant language
- Shell
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- Avg merge
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- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
### Describe the bug
Completed background agents are purged from the CLI agent registry very quickly, so read_agent can
return Agent not found even after a successful completion notification.
Summary
Background agents are retrievable while running, but completed agents appear to have only a very short retention
window. In this session, the original code-review-auditor agent auth-audit showed as running for several minutes,
then later vanished entirely from list_agents, and read_agent returned Agent not found. A separate live repro showed
the same behavior with tiny probe agents, so this does not look specific to the custom reviewer.
### Affected version
GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.21.
### Steps to reproduce the behavior
1. Start a tiny background agent.
2. Confirm it appears in list_agents while running.
3. Wait for completion notification.
4. Immediately call read_agent / list_agents --include_completed and observe it is briefly available.
5. Wait a few more seconds and call them again.
6. The completed agent disappears from list_agents, and read_agent returns no agent found.
### Expected behavior
Completed background agents should remain readable/listed for a reasonable period, at least long enough for normal
follow-up after the completion notification.
### Additional context
Actual
Completed agents are purged very quickly after finishing, sometimes within a few seconds of post-completion access.
Impact
Long-running background reviews can finish successfully but become unrecoverable before the user or orchestrator
reads the result, which makes background mode unreliable for required audit outputs.
Evidence from this session
- auth-audit was started and later observed as still running.
- Later, read_agent(auth-audit) returned Agent not found.
- Live repro agents showed the same short-lived post-completion availability.
Current workaround
- Use mode: "sync" when the result must be preserved before handoff.
- If using background, read and capture the result immediately after completion.
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start with the background-agent implementation behind the read_agent and list_agents entry points, comparing behavior while agents are running with list_agents --include_completed after completion. Reproduce the short post-completion retention window using a tiny background agent, then verify that completed agents remain readable and listed long enough for normal follow-up.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- shell
- Domain
- cli
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 45/100