Your Explore/search subagent got smarter — it now inherits the session model (capped at Opus 4.8)

AI Agents First·medium signal

As of v2.1.198 the Explore agent was upgraded from Haiku to inheriting the main session's model (capped at Opus 4.8), so read-only codebase exploration now runs at frontier quality instead of a cheap tier. Delegated search and mapping tasks return materially better results. Actionable: push more broad 'find/where/how does X work' fan-out onto the Explore agent now that it reasons at session strength, and reserve your main context for synthesis.