Improve subagent provider visibility
Open 💬 5 comments Opened Apr 10, 2026 by bakaburg1
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
What feature would you like to see?
The Codex app currently makes provider selection and subagent provider behavior hard to control and hard to understand in the UI.
I would like three related improvements:
- Add an easy provider picker in the Codex app UI for chat threads.
- This should make it possible to switch a thread from one provider to another without editing TOML.
- If switching providers invalidates or reduces the usefulness of cached thread content, that is acceptable, but the UI should warn the user clearly before the switch.
- Add a global way to choose a different provider for spawned agents.
- This should be supported in
config.toml. - Even better, it should also be exposed in the Codex app settings UI.
- This is useful because it often makes sense to keep the main thread on one provider while sending subagents to a cheaper provider or a local model.
- Fix the Codex app UI so subagents show the correct effective provider/model.
- Right now the subagent UI can show the provider/model of the calling agent even when the subagent is actually running on a different provider.
- This makes provider debugging much harder and creates false confidence about what is being used.
Why this matters
Provider/model routing is now a real workflow concern:
- main agent on one provider
- subagents on a cheaper provider
- local models for some tasks
- remote frontier models only where needed
The app should support this explicitly instead of requiring low-level config work and log inspection.
Concrete example
I configured subagents to use Azure with gpt-5.4-mini while keeping the main agent on OpenAI.
The authoritative child session metadata recorded:
model_provider = "azure"model = "gpt-5.4-mini"
But the spawned subagents self-reported and appeared in the UI as OpenAI / GPT-5.
That indicates the effective runtime configuration and the displayed provider/model are diverging.
Suggested behavior
- Thread-level provider picker in the app UI.
- Global default provider/model for subagents in config, plus an app settings surface for the same.
- Subagent UI should display the effective resolved provider/model of the spawned session, not inherit the parent thread display.
- If provider switching affects cache reuse or thread continuity, show an explicit warning before applying the change.
Additional information
This is partly a feature request and partly a correctness/UI bug:
- feature request: easier provider selection in app/settings
- correctness bug: subagent provider/model display does not match actual spawned-session metadata
5 Comments
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
Powered by Codex Action
Provider selection is already covered in #10867, which has some upvotes.
I'm going to change the title of this to focus on subagents to avoid overlap.
This feature will really help me 'read the road' as my 'Spec Before Code' discipline executes on plan. When this (hopefully) lands, I will likely tweak to get feedback for max capability needed (somehow - I'll make it up and try till it flies) so that each wave can 'right size'. 'Wake up Muttley you're dreaming again ...'.
If anyone is interested - my process for keeping large projects 'semantically tight' is documented here, with the last of six instalments quantitative data on document organization and retrieval mechanisms for the history built up. Like everything, it is a work in process, but could provide some feedback on a customer pattern emerging. As a curious item, Opus 5 now spontaneously uses the Claude Code decision picker from the planning phase for the open decisions (PCDN) in this process via agent instructions.
This would be even more cool in the Code App UI, which I really like, BTW.
Link to 'Spec Before Code' article series:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/spec-before-code-what-standards-bodies-knew-ira-abbott-3p9le
I would like to request a better model/provider switching experience in Codex.
My ideal workflow:
Example:
Model selector:
Currently, switching between these workflows requires changing provider configuration, authentication mode, or restarting Codex. This breaks the smooth agent workflow.
A coding agent should allow users to choose the best model for each task:
The UI should handle provider switching explicitly, including authentication differences, instead of requiring users to manually edit config files.
This would make Codex much more flexible for real-world multi-model workflows.
I also want this feature