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Vitrino docs

Subagents and background work

Claude can hand work to a subagent — a separate agent with its own context window — or start something in the background and carry on. Both change what the transcript looks like.

Subagents

When Claude uses the Agent or Task tool, the subagent's own steps are nested inside that row rather than mixed into the main conversation. You get a collapsed line saying which agent ran and how many steps it took; open it to see its work.

Nesting matters because a subagent can be busy for a long time. Flattened into one stream, its file reads and searches would bury the conversation you are having.

Inside a nested transcript, "user" messages are not from you — they are instructions from the main agent. Vitrino labels them that way rather than showing them as though you had typed them.

Background tasks

Some work runs in the background: a long command, a workflow, a delegated agent. The transcript shows it starting, reports progress, and says when it finished.

These lines are written to say what happened rather than to echo Claude Code's internal names — a task is described in words, with its own description where it has one.

When a background task finishes and Claude carries on without you prompting it, Vitrino marks that too:

"Run the integration suite" finished in the background, and Claude carried on.

The wording is careful on purpose. It says the task finished and Claude continued — not that one caused the other, which the messages do not actually establish.

What you see while you wait

  • Thinking appears as a collapsed line. While Claude is still thinking, it shows a running estimate of how much it has done, because that is the only sign of progress there is.
  • Streaming text arrives as Claude writes it.
  • Tool calls appear when made, and fill in their result when it arrives — a row can sit in a "running…" state.
  • A tool awaiting your approval says awaiting approval rather than pretending to run.

Stopping

Stop — or Esc from the message box — interrupts the turn. Subagents and background work started by that turn stop with it.

A stopped turn is recorded as Stopped, quietly. It is not an error and is not drawn as one.