You leave a team working for three unattended hours. You come back to a single completion notification from one teammate and nothing else, and the file it rewrote ignores a naming decision you settled with the lead in your own session before the team started. What is actually going on?

The principle — a notification is a signal, not a report, and a teammate knows the project as it is written down rather than as you discussed it.

Why the key is correct — two documented facts, one for each half of what you are looking at. First: the notification doesn't carry the teammate's output; a teammate shares results by messaging the lead or updating the shared task list. So there is more to read and it is somewhere you have not looked yet. Second: each teammate has its own context window, and when spawned, a teammate loads the same project context as a regular session: CLAUDE.md, MCP servers, and skills. The lead's conversation history does not carry over. Your naming decision lived in a conversation, not in a file, so it was never in that teammate's window — which is why the work is consistent with everything the teammate could see and wrong anyway. What to do follows from both halves: collect the results through the channel that actually carries them, and move a decision like that into the instructions file or into the brief, where a fresh session will read it. The three hours are part of the story too, because letting a team run unattended for too long increases the risk of wasted effort, and an hour of work against a convention nobody wrote down is exactly that.

Why the others are wrong — the first mistakes the notice for the work, which leaves the output unread. The second overshoots: a teammate is not blank, it loads the project the way any session does, and the gap is the discussion alone. The third treats the unattended hours as neutral when the length of the run is what decides how much has to be discarded.

Remember this — a notice means finished, not delivered. Whatever a teammate has to know, put it where a new session reads rather than where you said it.

Sources — Anthropic's Claude Code documentation on orchestrating teams of sessions.