claude-code - 💡(How to fix) Fix VS Code: Can't see what subagents are doing or if they're stuck [2 comments, 2 participants]

When I use agent teams in the VS Code extension, I have absolutely no idea what's going on once they spawn.

I can't see which agents are running, what they're working on, or if any of them got stuck somewhere. The only thing I can do is stare at the token counter going up and hope for the best. If one agent gets stuck in a loop or is waiting on some approval that never shows up, I won't know until I've already burned through a ton of tokens sitting there wondering why nothing is happening.

This is especially painful with bigger teams (5-10 agents). You launch them, and then it's just... silence. Did agent 3 finish? Is agent 7 stuck? Who knows. There's no way to check without killing everything and starting over.

The CLI at least shows agent activity inline in the terminal output, but the VS Code extension gives you nothing. No sidebar, no panel, no status indicator - just a blank wall while agents chew through your context.

What I'd love to see in the VS Code extension

Some kind of panel or status area that shows:

• A list of running agents with what they're supposed to be doing
• Some indication of whether they're actually making progress or just sitting there
• How long each one has been running
• The ability to look at what an individual agent has done so far
• A way to cancel a specific agent that's clearly stuck without nuking the whole session

Even something basic like a status bar showing "3 agents running (2 active, 1 idle for 4min)" would be a massive improvement over the current situation of flying completely blind.

Related

• #41461 - I ran into the worst case of this where background agents burned ~1.4M tokens and couldn't be stopped
• #43584 - The hook lifecycle gap that makes stuck detection impossible
• #26394 - Similar observability ask but for cross-project monitoring