7 of My 8 Claude Code Agents Had Zero Calls in 30 Days: Finding Dead Agents Automatically

I had eight custom agents defined in Claude Code. When I finally counted, seven of them hadn't been called once in the last 30 days. What keeps my ¥1.2M/month automation setup running isn't clever prompting. It's an environment that keeps checking, automatically, whether the things I built are actually doing anything. Why this setup works Claude Code lets you define custom agents by dropping .md files into the ~/.claude/agents/ directory. You define specialists like architect (architecture design), code-reviewer (code review), and security-reviewer (security audits), and expect Claude Code to pick the right one on its own. It's a natural assumption. But when you actually tally the logs, the results are surprising. Take my environment as an example. ~/.claude/agents/ currently holds eight agent definition files. architect.md code-reviewer.md database-reviewer.md INDEX.md planner.md python-reviewer.md security-reviewer.md typescript-reviewer.md ~/.claude/logs/agent-invocations.jsonl holds 682 records spanning May 28 to August 30, 2026. Aggregating the last 30 days gives this breakdown: === Agent usage (last 30d) === total invocations: 23 unique types: 3 Top 10: agent calls errors Explore 19 0 general-purpose 3 0 code-reviewer 1 0 0-call agents (defined locally but not used in 30d): 7 - INDEX - architect - database-reviewer - planner - python-reviewer - security-reviewer - typescript-reviewer Of the eight defined agents, exactly one, code-reviewer , was called even once in 30 days. The other seven had zero calls . 87.5% of the agents I'd defined might as well not have existed. Narrow it to the last 7 days and it gets worse: code-reviewer drops out too, and the zero-call list grows to eight. === Agent usage (last 7d) === total invocations: 3 unique types: 2 0-call agents (defined locally but not used in 7d): 8 - INDEX - architect - code-reviewer - database-reviewer - planner - python-reviewer - security-reviewer - typescript-reviewer This isn't just a "what a waste" sto