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Comment by Lucasoato | Hacker News Reader

> One of my key complaints with Opus 5.5 so far has been that sometimes it'll execute long-running commands in a way that is blocking any further input or it starts doing stuff without providing much visibility.

Is this a problem with the model or the harness in your opinion?

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Not the parent, but I've seen it and it's hard to say, 5.5 was being stupidly proactive in monitoring a long-running process in a sub-agent to the point of chowing tokens by continually monitoring.

I queried it and was told that sub-agents can't run processes a blocking fashion, I'm not sure the harness changed, or the model was handling it differently, but it require some changes to skills to prompt around it.

Previously after the subagent finished it sent a message to wake up the orchestrator agent. I hope they haven't changed this..

The model had tendency to use sleep to wait for the subagents but it is not necessary..

I have no idea how to evaluate this, but I've had it write down the same rule like 3 times and it still keeps managing to fall into this trap of blocking on commands. The fact that it refuses to adhere to my guidelines and rules is probably a model issue, but a better harness could probably overcome the issues.

When it launches command in a blocking shell, just press something like ctrl+b and this sends the shell to the background and you can continue to use the agent..

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