Hey, thanks for the detailed report.
I see the screenshot with a live test via the agent, thanks for running it. That really helps confirm the behavior.
Your read is correct: which Grok effort variant a subagent can use depends on what’s selected in the model picker. When it was set to Medium, spawning cursor-grok-4.5-high was rejected. After switching the picker to High, it went through (cursor-grok-4.5-high agent ok). Within a single session, you can’t use High, Medium, and Low at the same time, only the currently selected variant.
For now, there are two workarounds:
- Change the Grok effort in the picker before starting the chat. The saved variant is what decides what subagents can access, or keep separate chats per effort.
- Don’t specify a model for the subagent at all. Then it will inherit the parent model.
This is a known limitation on our side, I’ve reported it internally. No timeline for a change yet, but if I get an update I’ll reply in the thread.