Add per-sub-agent timeout / token budget / cancellation API
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 38/100
- Issue type
- Feature
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Tech stack
- node.js, typescript
- Domain
- api
Research direction
Start with the CustomAgentConfig and Session APIs described in the issue, reviewing the existing session.abort(), session.disconnect(), and subagent.started/subagent.completed entry points. Define how per-agent budgets, budget-exceeded events, and targeted cancellation should behave, then verify that one sub-agent can be stopped without disconnecting the session.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Summary
Consumers running multi-sub-agent sessions have no way to bound an individual sub-agent's execution time or cost. The only cancellation APIs are session-scoped (session.abort(), session.disconnect()), which kill the whole session including other concurrent sub-agents. A consumer with one runaway sub-agent has to choose between letting it burn cost/SLA or killing the whole session and losing the work of other agents.
Scenario
const session = await client.createSession({
customAgents: [
{ name: "researcher", description: "Codebase research", prompt: "..." }, // expected ~5 min
{ name: "fixer", description: "Apply fixes", prompt: "..." }, // expected ~15 min
],
});
await session.sendAndWait({ prompt: "Dispatch researcher then fixer." });
// On a complex codebase, researcher runs 90 minutes instead of 5.
// There's no way to kill JUST the researcher — only the whole session.
What's missing
CustomAgentConfig currently accepts {name, displayName?, description?, tools?, prompt, mcpServers?, infer?, skills?}. No maxTurnMs, maxTokens, maxToolCalls, or budget field.
Session class exposes session.abort() (cancels the current message, session remains valid — though see #1273 for in-flight sendAndWait still hanging) and session.disconnect() (kills the whole session). No session.agent("name").cancel() or session.cancelSubagent(toolCallId) equivalent.
Suggested API
- Per-agent budget options on
CustomAgentConfig:maxTurnMs,maxTokens,maxToolCalls. SDK/CLI enforces them and emitssubagent.budget_exceededevents when violated. - Per-sub-agent cancellation API:
session.cancelSubagent({ name?, toolCallId? })that kills a specific sub-agent without disconnecting the session.
Consumer impact
Production pipelines with cost or SLA requirements have to layer their own per-agent monitor watching subagent.started / subagent.completed events and tracking per-agent runtime. On overage they either log-and-tolerate (losing cost containment) or kill the whole session (losing work of other concurrent agents). Both choices are bad.
Production observation: a single misbehaving sub-agent (multi-tenant analysis worker) burned ~$150-200 in a single session before the surrounding watchdog hit the per-session ceiling. With a per-agent budget, the loss would have been ~$15.
Related
- #1273 —
session.disconnect()cooperative. Even when consumers detect runaway behavior and try to kill the session, the recovery path is broken. - #1275 —
sendAndWaitreturns prematurely. Without sub-agent completion tracking, consumers also can't reliably know which sub-agents are still running to budget them.
Environment
- SDK: @github/copilot-sdk@0.3.0
- CLI: @github/copilot@1.0.45
- Node: 22 LTS
- OS: Windows 11
- Model: claude-sonnet-4-6
- Dominant language
- Java
- Stars
- 10.5k
- Forks
- 1.5k
- Avg merge
- 1d 9h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 131
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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