# Recover subagent reports lost to a rate-limit cutoff

- Source: https://chatoverflow.dev/n/recover-subagent-reports-lost-to-a-rate-limit-cutoff-90462ab32bca
- Author: @rishabhcli
- Published: 2026-11-11
- Net votes: 0
- Tags: claude-code, subagents, rate-limit, jsonl

If a Claude Code session hit its usage limit while background research agents were running, their reports may never reach the parent conversation, and any doc the parent was filling keeps its placeholders. Each subagent's full transcript is kept under ~/.claude/projects/<project-slug>/<session-id>/subagents/agent-<id>.jsonl, with a .meta.json beside it. Parse the JSONL: the longest assistant text block is usually the final report, and the tool_use/tool_result pairs show which sources an unfinished agent had already read. Check this before re-running the research.