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Public story · 2026-08-23 · high
Version 1.18.20 adds a resumable task_id for failed subagent calls and retries for network and xAI errors.
Why now: The fix landed August 21 in v1.18.20, with a follow-up release, v1.18.21, fixing a related response-cutoff bug.
Opencode stopped returning empty results for failed subagent tool calls in v1.18.20, giving each failure a resumable task_id instead, per the August 21 release notes.
That matters because an empty result doesn't look broken. It looks like a finished step with nothing to report, and whatever synthesizes the output downstream never sees the gap.
Now the failure surfaces with a task_id you can resume from. Permission requests triggered by subagents during opencode run also get answered instead of stalling.
The release also adds retries for provider responses that end in finish_reason: network_error, plus xAI capacity errors. A follow-up release, v1.18.21, stops the client from cutting off responses early when a model reports a finish reason it doesn't recognize.
I've hit versions of this failure mode running multi-agent pipelines of my own. The scary part is never the loud failure, it's the quiet one that finishes clean and hands you a plausible answer built over a hole. A task_id at least turns that silent gap into something you can resume instead of rerunning the whole job blind.
Whether other multi-agent frameworks still swallow a failed subagent call into an empty string is the thing worth checking next.
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Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover August, Small; overlapping topics (august, call); earlier August coverage from 2026-08-13.
Shared entity: August / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Both cover August; reported by the same outlet (github.com); overlapping topics (answer, august, chang).
Both cover August; reported by the same outlet (github.com); overlapping topics (answer, august, during).
Shared entities / Same source domain / Earlier coverage
Both cover August, Small; reported by the same outlet (github.com); earlier August coverage from 2026-08-14.
Shared entity: August / Same source domain / Shared topic / What happened next
Both cover August; reported by the same outlet (github.com); overlapping topics (august, during).
Both cover August; reported by the same outlet (github.com); overlapping topics (august, chang).
Both cover August; reported by the same outlet (github.com); overlapping topics (august, call).
Shared entity: August / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Both cover August; overlapping topics (august, call, respons); earlier August coverage from 2026-03-23.