Recommended approach for claude code "agents view"?

[ensconced]

varlock run works great for exposing environment variables to individual instances of claude code, but it doesn't seem to work well when using claude's agent view.

If you start agent view like this, and then start an agent from the agent view (simply by typing a prompt and hitting enter), the environment variables don't seem to be available to the agent.

varlock run -- claude agents

I think this is because the individual agents are child processes of the claude daemon process rather than being children of the process that runs the "claude agents" UI.

Any recommendations? I'm open to rethinking my general setup a bit if necessary. If there was a way of controlling which secrets were available to each individual agent, that would be plus.

[theoephraim]

Thanks for reporting this. What you’re seeing is expected with how Claude Agent View works.

varlock run -- claude agents injects env into the process you launch, but Agent View uses a long-lived background supervisor/daemon for dispatched sessions. If that supervisor was already running (or started in a different env), newly dispatched agents may not see the vars you expected.

Recommended practices:

1. For one project with shared stable secrets:

   • Stop existing daemon, then start Agent View under varlock:
   • claude daemon stop --any
   • varlock run -- claude agents

2. For multiple projects with different env:

   • Run separate Agent View instances with separate CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR values (one per project), each started via varlock run.
   • This keeps supervisor/session state isolated per project.

3. For changing or task-specific secrets:

   • Prefer command-level injection inside tasks (varlock run -- <command>) rather than relying on long-lived supervisor env.
   • If startup env must change, restart the affected session/supervisor.

Rule of thumb:

• Stable, baseline runtime secrets -> inject at claude agents startup.
• Frequently changing or task-specific secrets -> inject per command.