Subagents launched in iTerm pane missing MCP servers

[NoahCardoza]

Issue

This new sub-agents feature in the iTerm pane is awesome. But I was trying it out today and it appeared it was going in circles looking for the MCP server, and after a little investigation and having the parent session retry, it appears that it's for some reason not inheriting the MCP server, even though the main cloud process believes it should.

Have you experienced this before?

The left pane is the master process, and the top right pane was the first process, but I noticed it was going in circles, reading the config and MCP files. I tried restarting the agent multiple times, but it's not inheriting the MCP.

Fix

When I had them run in the background, it worked.

[NoahCardoza]

I just realized I'm not up to date, so maybe this can be ignored.

[NoahCardoza]

I updated to the latest on master but I'm still experiencing this issue...

[acreeger]

Oh this is a good one - what are the repro steps? Are you running a swarm with the CLI? (I rarely use that outside of the vscode extension tbh)

Thanks @NoahCardoza!

[NoahCardoza]

Interesting, yes I was running it with the CLI. I think the solution may be to use claude mcp to add them to the .claude.json so all agents inherit it when run in that file path. I'll give the vs code extension a try and see if that solves it.

[NoahCardoza]

I tried using the claude mcp command to install the MCP servers, but it turns out that that command uses the main repository workspace if you are inside a worktree. Even if you manually edit the settings for that worktree path, they won't be merged with the main workspace... (seems like a bug in claude code). Anyways, that's not a viable option.

I thought that perhaps the issue was caused because I had a .mcp.json file checked in, so I removed that, but that still didn't fix it.

Right now, the way I'm able to fix it is to give Claude this command before it creates the swarm, and then everything works out.

How swarm agents get MCP server access:

  The iloom CLI generates a JSON MCP config file at:
  ~/.config/iloom-ai/mcp-configs/<encoded-epic-worktree-path>.json

  This file defines the issue_management and recap MCP servers with their credentials and environment variables. The
   path to it is stored in .claude/iloom-swarm-mcp-config-path inside the epic worktree.

  For child agents to pick up these servers, the config must be symlinked as .mcp.json in each child worktree's root
   directory. Claude Code reads .mcp.json from the working directory to discover MCP servers.

  ln -sf "<mcp-config-path>" "<child-worktree>/.mcp.json"

I still haven't tried in VS code yet... I'll try to get to that soon.

[NoahCardoza]

@acreeger priming with this prompt before the swarm workers are started seems to work pretty well. Would you like me to open a PR to insert this into the instructions?

[acreeger]

@NoahCardoza yes - that would be awesome!

[acreeger]

Another option is to always force background swarm execution - you might have found a bug in Claude code because the MCP loading should be consistent regardless of how the agent teams are executed.