2026-03-13

Subagent reliability investigation

Fresh implementation subagent launch for subagent/ACP reliability failed immediately before doing any task work.
Failure mode: delegated run was spawned with model glm-5, which resolved to provider model zai/glm-5.
Current agent auth profiles across installed agents include openai-codex:default, litellm:default, and github-copilot:github; there is no zai auth profile configured in agent auth stores.
Verified by inspecting agent auth profile keys under:
- /home/openclaw/.openclaw/agents/*/agent/auth-profiles.json
Relevant OpenClaw docs confirm:
- subagent spawns inherit caller model when sessions_spawn.model is omitted
- provider/model auth errors like No API key found for provider "zai" occur when a provider model is selected without matching auth
- multi-agent auth is per-agent via ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/agent/auth-profiles.json
Conclusion: the immediate failure was caused by an incorrect explicit model selection in the spawn request, not by missing auth propagation between agents.
Corrective action: retry fresh delegation with litellm/glm-5 (the intended medium-tier routed model for delegated implementation work in this setup).
Will explicitly requested on 2026-03-13 to use gpt-5.4 for subagents for now while debugging delegation reliability.