Is subagent_type="general-purpose" intentional in workflows?

[njh513]

I've noticed my orchestrator appears to arbitrarily alternate between spawning a general purpose agent or the task-specific GSD-defined subagent. While I know the prompt begins with instruction to read the agent .md file for role and instructions (e.g. /workflows/plan-phase.md line 135) I wanted to confirm this is intended behavior.

[njh513]

After reviewing some closed PRs it does appear to be intentional / a result of current Claude limitations. As per glittercowboy:

"Closing — this is a known limitation caused by Claude Code bug anthropics/claude-code#13898.

The problem: Custom subagents can't access MCP tools (they hallucinate instead). GSD agents need Context7 MCP for documentation lookups.

The workaround: We spawn general-purpose (which has MCP access) and have it read the agent file as its first action. This works on Claude Code but breaks on OpenCode since it doesn't have a general-purpose agent type.

Resolution: Once Anthropic fixes #13898, we'll switch to proper subagent types (gsd-planner, gsd-phase-researcher, etc.) which will work on all runtimes.

Tracking upstream: anthropics/claude-code#13898"