I Told My AI Subagent "Read-Only." It Pushed to Main Anyway.
Some backstory: my backlog had grown to nearly a hundred open tickets, and a fair chunk were probably stale — work that had quietly gotten done without anyone closing the ticket. A classic research task: pull up ten old issues, check them against the actual code, report back what’s still real versus what’s a “ghost.” For exactly this kind of task, I dispatch parallel subagents — small, scoped agent instances that work in the background while the main session keeps going. Three batches, ten issues each, all launched with the same instruction: ...