fix(dispatch): bound the abandonment retry so a reaped slot is actually reclaimed by khaliqgant · Pull Request #429 · AgentWorkforce/software-garden

khaliqgant · 2026-09-02T07:46:32Z

The outage

One batch slot pinned by an occupant whose placed agents no longer exist, six work units queued behind it, for 14.4 hours across many container restarts. readinessReconcile reported healthy throughout. #423 shipped the reporting for this (pastOccupiedDeadline); the recovery did not ship. This is the recovery.

Which gate was firing — measured, not argued

#sweepHeldAgentDeadlines has six continue sites. I put a counter on every one of them, plus reached (entered the loop body past the deadline check) and released (got all the way to #abandonStuckDispatch), and ran the live shape through five arms: durable row running, two agents each carrying a spawn result, heldSinceAtMs 12.66h back against a 4h agentHoldTimeoutMs, slotHeldSinceAtMs 14.39h back, seeded under an owner that is gone so the boot claim is a genuine restart, one issue queued behind batchSize: 1.

arm	where the sweep stops	durable phase	queue drains
A prior lease expired, release succeeds	released	`abandoned`	yes
B prior lease still live	never swept — row is never adopted, so it is not an occupant at all	`running`	no
C prior lease expired, release fails 503 `agent_host_unavailable`	`#abandonedDispatchReasons` fence	`abandoning`	no
D prior lease expired, release fails 404 `agent_not_found`	released	`abandoned`	yes
E adopted, then the lease fence refuses renewal	`#assertDispatchLifecycleOwner`	`running`	no

The terminal gate never fires. Its counter stayed at zero in all five arms, and it cannot fire for an occupant by construction: #adoptInFlightAgents skips terminal rows before batch.restore, and #dispatchSlotOccupants projects #batchView.inFlight. A terminal row is therefore neither an occupant nor something the sweep iterates.

Arm B is not the live shape either — a row whose prior lease is still live is never adopted, so it produces no occupant and does not count toward active.

Arm D matters as a control: a ghost whose release answers 404 agent_not_found is already forgiven by isAgentAlreadyGoneOnRelease and reaps cleanly. "The agents are ghosts" is not on its own sufficient to wedge — the release has to fail with something that is not a 404, which is exactly the 503 a host that is gone returns.

What is actually broken

The reaper was never the missing piece. It fires, classifies the row correctly, and calls #abandonStuckDispatch. What it could not do was finish:

#abandonStuckDispatch releases every tracked agent when the reason is held-past-deadline.
A placed agent whose host is gone answers release with a 503, which is a real failure, so cleanupComplete is false.
#scheduleAbandonedDispatchRetry re-arms at 1 Hz forever — it was the one release-retry entry point in the file that never charged the fix(orchestrator): bound the completion release retry, and publish the sweep bounds that already exist #379 budget. #scheduleDispatchLifecycleRetry charges it under releaseAttempt; #scheduleReleaseRetry's local arm charges it directly.
The row sits in abandoning, which dispatchPhaseOccupiesSlot does not exclude, so it keeps its slot.
Every later sweep pass skips it at its own #abandonedDispatchReasons fence — the reaper fenced out by the cleanup the reaper itself started.
#driveDispatchLifecycle's phase === 'abandoning' branch re-enters the same failing abandon on every restart, which is how it survives container boots.

A permanent dispatch outage assembled entirely out of correct-looking parts.

The change

#abandonStuckDispatchFenced now bounds its consecutive failed teardowns (#abandonmentTeardownMayRetry, ten attempts, the same bound #379 uses). Once the budget is spent it stops re-arming and falls through to the terminal abandoned save it was always going to reach.

What is dead-lettered is the teardown, not the abandonment. abandoned is the truthful outcome — this dispatch really was abandoned past its deadline — and it does not occupy a slot, so the local batch and both state stores' batchSize admission are freed by the existing tail, along with all the bookkeeping that already lives there: #recordDispatchTerminal, the Slack and GitHub comment watchers, batch completion, and promotion of the next queued unit.

The budget is its own map rather than #379's. #379's carries a lease-relinquishing re-entry contract that assumes the caller has stopped driving the key; this caller is about to finish it terminally. Its source-scanning guard test, which pins #chargeReleaseAttempt to two call sites, is left exactly as it was.

What this deliberately does not do

An earlier revision of this PR handed the row to #releaseDeadLetteredSlot and retained it in releasing for a successor, mirroring #379. codex flagged that as a P1 and was right: a releasing row is re-driven by #finishDurableRelease, which terminalizes as complete, counts done and emits issue-done. A timed-out dispatch would have been recovered as a successful completion, and the abandonment-specific bookkeeping skipped — reachable precisely in the recovery case the handoff existed for. The must-fire test now asserts counters.done stays unset for exactly this reason.

Restart survival: reclaim, not clear-on-boot

#419's third acceptance criterion allows either. This takes reclaim. A new instance adopts the abandoning row through #driveDispatchLifecycle's existing branch, re-drives the teardown, exhausts a fresh ten-attempt budget in about ten seconds, and terminalizes — no boot-time special case and no durable record discarded.

The new failure mode, stated plainly

Agents whose release never succeeded are left behind rather than retried forever. That is the honest cost. Why it is safer than a permanent stall:

it takes ten consecutive failed teardowns to get there, and on the reap path the row is already past agentHoldTimeoutMs;
those agents have already been marked terminal with the fleet client earlier in the same method;
their names, the reason and the attempt count are logged at error — not warn — so the give-up is never inferable only from the absence of further log lines, and the must-fire test pins that log line and its unreleasedAgents list;
ten consecutive failures against a host reported gone is evidence the agents are not running; recovering one that is running is a bounded, visible operator action, against an unbounded and silent outage.

This change does not touch the fail-closed owner check. Arm E is reachable in principle but is a different defect with a different signature, and I have not proven it fires in the live shape — so it is deliberately left alone rather than loosened blind. The unbounded preview-teardown re-arm on the same path is also left alone: it carries its own stated safety rationale ("do not commit a terminal lifecycle while an externally reachable preview remains") and is not the measured wedge.

Tests

MUST FIRE — the live shape with a 503 on release: the row terminalizes as abandoned, the queued issue actually dispatches, waiting returns to 0, and the budget is spent exactly once. It asserts the release genuinely failed (the 503 warn) so it cannot pass through the pre-existing 404 path and prove nothing, and it asserts counters.done stays unset so the row can never be recovered as a completion.
MUST NOT FIRE — the same fixture with one field changed, a hold inside its bound: nothing is released, nothing is dispatched, the occupant is untouched, and none of the three budget/retry counters move. The must-fire case is its control, so a quiet pass here is a real negative rather than a fixture that never armed.

Fail-first verified against origin/main: the must-fire test fails with phase: 'abandoning' held for the full 40s timeout — the wedge itself, not an unrelated setup failure. Re-verified after the restructure.

src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts: 672 passed. tsc -p tsconfig.build.json, npm run build and featuremap:check all clean.

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…ly reclaimed The held-agent reaper was never the missing piece. It fires, classifies the row correctly and calls `#abandonStuckDispatch`. What it could not do was finish: `#abandonStuckDispatch` releases every tracked agent when the reason is `held-past-deadline`, a placed agent whose host is gone answers `release` with a 503 rather than the 404 `isAgentAlreadyGoneOnRelease` forgives, and the resulting `cleanupComplete: false` re-armed `#scheduleAbandonedDispatchRetry` at 1 Hz forever with the batch slot still held in `abandoning`. Every later sweep pass then skipped the row at its own `#abandonedDispatchReasons` fence — the reaper fenced out by the cleanup the reaper itself started. `#scheduleAbandonedDispatchRetry` was the one release-retry entry point in the file that never charged the #379 budget; `#scheduleDispatchLifecycleRetry` charges it under `releaseAttempt` and `#scheduleReleaseRetry`'s local arm charges it directly. Charge it here too. Bounding it alone is not enough. `#releaseDeadLetteredSlot` hands back the PROCESS-LOCAL slot, which was the whole repair for #379 because the only phase it could reach was `releasing` — excluded by `dispatchPhaseOccupiesSlot`, so both state stores' `batchSize` admission already ignored the row. The abandonment path retains `abandoning`, which that predicate does not exclude, so freeing only the local slot would leave the store counting the row against `batchSize`: a durable dispatch refused for capacity with nothing in flight that explains it. Demote the retained row to `releasing` first, which also wakes the capacity waiters through the existing occupancy-transition reset. `releasing` and not a terminal phase, deliberately: the agents were never torn down, so the work unit is not clean. The row is retained for a successor or a restart to re-drive with a fresh budget, which is how reclamation survives a restart rather than depending on clearing the durable record on boot. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G7NvmwPFWLoJjqNwRr759s Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180 Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180

coderabbitai · 2026-09-02T07:46:41Z

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The factory now bounds abandoned-dispatch teardown retries, tracks placement liveness, applies effective hold deadlines, and validates routed GitHub label updates. Tests cover reclamation, placement states, deadline behavior, and whole-label issue updates.

Changes

Factory lifecycle handling

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Bound abandoned teardown retries `src/orchestrator/factory.ts`, `src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts`	The factory tracks teardown attempts, prevents repeated retries after exhaustion, uses an injectable retry interval, and records unreleased agents before terminal abandonment.
Apply placement-aware hold deadlines `src/orchestrator/factory.ts`	The factory records backend tracking observations, classifies placements as live, gone, or unmeasured, and uses the shorter deadline only when all placements are known gone.
Validate routed lifecycle label updates `src/orchestrator/factory.ts`	GitHub validation accepts complete label-set updates, matches lifecycle labels case-insensitively, preserves the safety label, and requires at most one lifecycle claim.
Verify lifecycle behavior `src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts`	Tests cover placement liveness, bounded partial-release reclamation, deadline-preserving behavior, and routed whole-label updates.

Estimated code review effort: 4 (Complex) | ~60 minutes

Merge Risk:🟡 Moderate · up to ab1ad

The recovery behavior is bounded and otherwise mergeable, but one lifecycle test currently asserts the wrong agent name and will fail until corrected; the change also adds redundant fleet scans for multi-agent records, which should receive owner follow-up.

Sequence Diagram(s)

sequenceDiagram
participant Factory
participant FleetClient
participant DispatchLifecycle
participant Queue
Factory->>FleetClient: Release placed agents
FleetClient-->>Factory: Return partial release failure
Factory->>Factory: Exhaust teardown budget
Factory->>DispatchLifecycle: Mark dispatch abandoned
DispatchLifecycle-->>Queue: Release occupied capacity
Queue->>Factory: Start queued work

Suggested reviewers:kjgbot, miyaontherelay

Poem

A rabbit counts each teardown try
Gone placements shorten time nearby
Labels travel as one set
Dead letters stop the regret
And queued work hops by

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly summarizes the primary change: bounding abandonment retries so stuck dispatch slots are reclaimed.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description directly explains the dispatch outage, bounded teardown retries, terminal abandonment behavior, restart recovery, and test coverage.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

Full details: Docstring Coverage

Explanation

No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 0 files. (2 skipped: 2 too large.)

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chatgpt-codex-connector · 2026-09-02T07:46:42Z

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github-actions · 2026-09-02T07:46:52Z

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…omplete Review (codex, P1 on #429): routing the dead-lettered row through `releasing` hands it to `#finishDurableRelease`, which terminalizes as `complete`, counts `done` and emits `issue-done` — so a dispatch that timed out and was being abandoned would be recovered as a successful completion, and every piece of abandonment bookkeeping after the terminal save (`#recordDispatchTerminal`, the Slack and GitHub watchers, batch completion, promotion of the next queued unit) would be skipped. Correct, and reachable exactly in the recovery case the handoff existed for. Keep the abandonment on its own terminal path instead. What is dead-lettered is the TEARDOWN, not the abandonment: `#abandonStuckDispatchFenced` now bounds its consecutive failed teardowns and, once the budget is spent, falls through to the terminal `abandoned` save it was always going to reach. `abandoned` is the truthful outcome and does not occupy a slot, so the local batch and both stores' `batchSize` admission are freed by the existing tail — no demotion and no second slot-handback path. The budget is its own map rather than #379's. Those carry a lease-relinquishing re-entry contract that assumes the caller has stopped driving the key, and this caller is about to finish it terminally; #379's source-scanning guard test, which pins its call sites at two, is left exactly as it was. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G7NvmwPFWLoJjqNwRr759s Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180

github-actions · 2026-09-02T08:04:25Z

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Inline comments:
In `@src/orchestrator/factory.ts`:
- Around line 12099-12166: Update `#abandonmentTeardownMayRetry` so
unreleasedAgents includes only entries whose tracked agent has not been
released, using the existing releasedAtMs === undefined condition before
sorting; preserve the current logging and retry behavior.

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The ten-attempt bound is what is under test, not how long ten attempts take. At the production cadence the pair spent 27 seconds sleeping, and wall clock in this suite is not free: `vitest.config.ts` sets no `testTimeout`, so the 5s default makes unrelated files time out under load. Down to 5.8s. `#scheduleAbandonedDispatchRetry` was the one retry scheduler that hardcoded `DISPATCH_LIFECYCLE_RETRY_MS` instead of the injectable `dispatchLifecycleRetryMs` its siblings use. That field defaults to the same constant, so production is unchanged; hardcoding it only made this the one retry path a test could not run at speed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G7NvmwPFWLoJjqNwRr759s Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180

github-actions · 2026-09-02T08:18:27Z

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Requested for exact head d40db868d25d1258805e27c5f71df40917f63646.

…e agents that failed Review fixes on #429. cubic P1: deleting `#abandonmentTeardownAttempts` at exhaustion reset the budget, so a terminal save refused after the dead-letter would re-run the teardown and spend a fresh ten attempts on every retry. An exhausted key now lands in `#abandonmentTeardownDeadLettered` and stays there, and `#abandonStuckDispatchFenced` skips the teardown entirely for such a key rather than re-attempting releases that have already failed ten times. Both are cleared together on the terminal save. CodeRabbit and cubic, same finding: `unreleasedAgents` logged every tracked agent. `record.agents` retains a released agent's entry and marks it with `releasedAtMs`, so a partial teardown failure named workers that had already terminated cleanly — in the one diagnostic an operator gets when automated cleanup gives up. Filter on `releasedAtMs`. The must-fire fixture now fails only the reviewer's release, so it can tell a correct list from one that names everything; with the filter removed it fails on that assertion. cubic P3: a test comment still named the `abandoning` -> `releasing` transition the earlier revision used. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G7NvmwPFWLoJjqNwRr759s Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180

github-actions · 2026-09-02T08:37:51Z

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Requested for exact head 788311c65371c4a049250c0ef45d145d9a561fda.

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Review (cubic, P2): the fixture threw before `super.release`, so a failed release left no trace — `fleet.releases` records only the successes. Every assertion in the must-fire case would therefore still hold for a regression that dead-lettered after a single attempt, or one that kept retrying past the bound. Count the failures in the fake and assert exactly eleven: the ten teardown passes the budget allows plus the pass that exhausts it. Assert the exhaustion log's own `attempts: 10` alongside `maxAttempts`, so the two have to agree. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G7NvmwPFWLoJjqNwRr759s Session-Id: 5a5e3980-c173-4dd5-966e-b9f135490180

github-actions · 2026-09-02T08:51:54Z

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github-actions · 2026-09-02T18:26:13Z

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Requested for exact head ab1adac079387e6f11eedb98a7853e702cf67dd5.

khaliqgant · 2026-09-02T18:26:24Z

Adopted this PR as owner (pr-orphan-owner-0902); the authoring lane was released. Sequencing gate cleared and verified — not a rubber stamp.

#433 merged at 18:03Z as 62c78e2, so this PR's stated "#433 lands first" condition is now satisfied. But its green was stale: CI last ran at 48a4e8b / 08:51Z against a base 5 commits behind main, i.e. before #433 existed. A green run against a base that predates the change you must sequence after is not evidence about the combined result.

I merged origin/main in at ab1adac (a merge, deliberately not a rebase — a force-push would orphan the review threads already resolved here) and verified the seam locally first.

The seam I expected to break, and what actually happened.#433 changes which timeout #holdDeadline picks; this PR changes where the reaper acts. They do not overlap textually — #433's hunks sit at ~1107–10729, this PR's at ~885 and ~12029–12200 — so the clean merge is real, not lucky. My concrete worry was the MUST NOT FIRE control: its fixture is built to sit inside a 4h agentHoldTimeoutMs, and #433 can now fall back to Math.min(agentless, agent) = 30 min once every placement reads gone. If that fallback applied to this fixture, the control would start firing and silently stop being a control.

It does not. On the merged base the fixture's placements never resolve to gone — the fixture's backend contributes no tracked-set evidence, so they read unmeasured and keep the full hold, which is #433's fail-closed direction working as designed.

Verified on ab1adac:

MUST FIRE — reclaims the slot and drains the queue when the ghosts cannot be released: passes.
MUST NOT FIRE — leaves a slot held by a live agent inside its deadline alone: passes, and still as a control rather than as a test that can no longer arm.
src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts — 676/676.
tsc -p tsconfig.build.json, npm run build — clean. featuremap:check — ok: true, 0 advisories.

One flake, discriminated rather than asserted. The first full run on the merged base failed 1 test — uses Relayfile by-id delivery claims for renamed PR activity…, a 5s timeout in the PR babysitter, untouched by this PR. Controls: full suite on plain origin/main → 674/674 clean; full suite on the merged base again → 676/676 clean. So it is the intermittent shape #433 already documented for this file, not something the merge introduced. Recording it because one clean re-run is not the same as it never having failed, and the next person to see it deserves the prior.

Not addressed here, and not mine to close: nothing has substantively reviewed this at head. Devin Review and CodeRabbit both report pass while explicitly declining to review — "trial expired and no credits remaining" and "rate limited" — and they land as legacy commit statuses, so a check-run query does not see the refusal. cubic did run (3m36s) and its last summary predates this merge. Treat the review board as unreviewed, not as approving.

Not merged. Khaliq holds the merge gate.

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Actionable comments posted: 1

🧹 Nitpick comments (1)

src/orchestrator/factory.ts (1)
10736-10742: 🚀 Performance & Scalability | 🔵 Trivial | ⚡ Quick win
Hoist #holdDeadline(hold) out of the per-agent loop in #writeInFlightRegistry.
appendAgent receives the same record as hold for every agent in record.agents (see the unchanged call site a few lines below), and holdDeadlineAtMs now calls this.#holdDeadline(hold) inside that closure. Before this change, this was a cheap constant lookup; now #holdDeadline calls #hasLivePlacement, which calls #observeTrackedAgents() and iterates this.#fleet.trackedAgents() on every invocation. The result does not vary per agent within one record, so a record with several agents recomputes the identical deadline that many times on every #writeInFlightRegistry() call, which runs on nearly every state transition (spawn, exit, completion, dispatch-claim writeback).
For a remote-placement fleet, #terminationRoots returns immediately for each agent (locality === 'remote' short-circuits before any process work), so this redundant fleet-wide iteration is not masked by other per-agent work and adds up across concurrently held dispatches.
Compute the deadline once per record and pass it into appendAgent, the same way status() already hoists this.#holdDeadline(record) outside its per-agent heldAgentsForRecord mapping.
♻️ Proposed fix
 const appendAgent = async (
issue: IssueRef,
agentName: string,
tracked: TrackedAgent,
- hold?: InFlightIssue,+ hold?: InFlightIssue,+ holdTimeoutMs?: number,
): Promise<void> => {
...
...(hold?.heldSinceAtMs !== undefined ? {
heldSinceAtMs: hold.heldSinceAtMs,
- holdDeadlineAtMs: hold.heldSinceAtMs- + (this.#holdDeadline(hold)?.timeoutMs ?? this.#config.dispatch.agentHoldTimeoutMs),+ holdDeadlineAtMs: hold.heldSinceAtMs+ + (holdTimeoutMs ?? this.#config.dispatch.agentHoldTimeoutMs),
waitingForTerminalState: this.#config.terminalState,
...(hold.lifecyclePhase ? { lifecyclePhase: hold.lifecyclePhase } : {}),
} : {}),
})
}
 if (record.dispatchClaim) {
this.#dispatchClaimStatuses.set(dispatchLifecycleKey(record.issue), record.dispatchClaim)
}
+ const holdTimeoutMs = record.heldSinceAtMs !== undefined+ ? this.#holdDeadline(record)?.timeoutMs+ : undefined
for (const [agentName, tracked] of record.agents) {
- await appendAgent(record.issue, agentName, tracked, record)+ await appendAgent(record.issue, agentName, tracked, record, holdTimeoutMs)
}
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In `@src/orchestrator/factory.ts` around lines 10736 - 10742, In
`#writeInFlightRegistry`, compute this.#holdDeadline(hold) once per record before
iterating agents, then pass the resulting deadline into appendAgent and use it
for holdDeadlineAtMs. Remove the per-agent `#holdDeadline`(hold) call while
preserving the existing fallback timeout behavior.

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Inline comments:
In `@src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts`:
- Line 33527: Update the release assertion in the relevant factory test to
expect the repo-suffixed implementer name ar-419-impl-pear, matching the
label-routed implementer naming used by the adjacent queued-issue assertion.
---
Nitpick comments:
In `@src/orchestrator/factory.ts`:
- Around line 10736-10742: In `#writeInFlightRegistry`, compute
this.#holdDeadline(hold) once per record before iterating agents, then pass the
resulting deadline into appendAgent and use it for holdDeadlineAtMs. Remove the
per-agent `#holdDeadline`(hold) call while preserving the existing fallback
timeout behavior.
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src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts
src/orchestrator/factory.ts

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khaliqgant · 2026-09-02T18:45:58Z

CI status on ab1adac, stated honestly rather than as a green tick.

The first run against the real base failedpackage: src/cli/fleet.test.ts > keeps relay dispatch ownership until the remote PR is published and the issue is parked (5012ms timeout) and src/node/tailscale-preview.test.ts > bounds a slow readiness probe by one wall-clock deadline (303ms). I re-ran it and it passed — but a rerun is a diagnosis, not a verdict, so here is what actually discriminates:

Neither file is touched by this PR. It changes src/orchestrator/factory.ts and src/orchestrator/factory.test.ts only.
Both pass locally on this exact merge — src/cli/fleet.test.ts + src/node/tailscale-preview.test.ts, 199/199.
main itself is red at the same base. Run 33664882113 on 62c78e2f — the fix(dispatch): stop a dead placement from buying an 8x longer hold #433 merge commit that is currently the tip of main — failed package on a different test: keeps the terminal drain waiting on the receipt the fence itself writes.
A different test fails each run, which is the signature of a flaky suite rather than a defect this branch introduced.
fix(dispatch): stop a dead placement from buying an 8x longer hold #433's own description independently documents fleet.test.ts > keeps relay dispatch ownership… timing out on four branches — including this one by name (fix/reclaim-occupied-slot-past-deadline) — and the terminal-drain test failing on main@06e08ffc.

So: this PR is not the cause, and I am not claiming the rerun proves it healthy. The package job is unreliable at head of main right now, which means "CI green per workflow" is a weaker signal on this repo than it looks. That is worth someone's attention independently of this PR — a merge gate that fails ~30% of the time on unrelated timing tests trains people to re-run until green, which is exactly how a real failure gets waved through.

Local verification on ab1adac remains: factory.test.ts676/676 (twice), tsc -p tsconfig.build.json clean, npm run build clean, featuremap:checkok: true / 0 advisories.

… of pinning the only batch slot (#440) * fix(dispatch): bound a PR publication that can never succeed, instead of pinning the only batch slot The publish retry loop had no bound, and it holds a `batchSize` slot the whole time it spins. `#saveDispatchLifecycle(record, 'publishing')` runs BEFORE the attempt and `publishing` is a slot-occupying phase (`dispatchPhaseOccupiesSlot`), so a publication that can never succeed does not merely retry -- it removes dispatch capacity for the life of the process, and the durable `publishing` row puts it straight back after a restart. ## Measured, on the live deployment A cloud dispatch's implementer commits only ever exist inside its sandbox, so the head ref is not on GitHub and `POST /pulls` answers 422 `Validation Failed` every time, for the same reason every time (factory#430). One such row logged 274 attempts on a single boot. With `batchSize: 1` that was a total dispatch stop with eight work units queued behind it, and clearing the durable row by hand bought 8 seconds before the next sweep re-dispatched into the identical failure. ## Where the loop actually turns Not at the agent-exit handler's catch -- that runs once, on the first failure. Every attempt after it arrives at `#driveDispatchLifecycle`'s `publishing` branch, throws out of the drive, and is re-armed by the generic `.catch()` arm in `#scheduleDispatchLifecycleRetry`. That arm is deliberately uncharged, because it also serves dispatch and recovery failures, and #379's source-scan guard pins exactly that. So the bound goes at the publish site, and all three of that guard's assertions are left untouched. ## The change `#abandonExhaustedPublish` charges a publish-specific budget (`DISPATCH_PUBLISH_MAX_ATTEMPTS`, ten attempts at the 1 Hz floor -- the same shape and reasoning as `DISPATCH_LIFECYCLE_MAX_RELEASE_ATTEMPTS`). Under budget it returns false and the caller behaves exactly as before. Over it, the work unit is abandoned through `#abandonStuckDispatch` and the drive resolves rather than rethrowing, which is what stops the re-arm. The budget is refunded on a successful publication, because a publication is the only progress this loop can make. That is what keeps a transient outage -- one failure then a success -- unaffected. `abandoned`, not `complete`. `#releaseDeadLetteredSlot`'s `releasing` handoff would be re-driven by `#finishDurableRelease` into a terminal `complete` that counts `done` and emits `issue-done`, recording a dispatch that produced no pull request as a successful one -- the codex P1 on the sibling release path in #429, reachable here for the same reason. The must-fire test pins `counters.done` staying unset. ## What this does and does not fix It does not make the PR appear; only a real push can do that, and that is factory#430 proper. What it removes is the amplifier: one poisoned work unit can no longer take the whole factory down with it. An `abandoned` row is skipped by the readiness sweep, so the unit parks rather than being re-dispatched into the same deterministic failure, and the queued work behind it gets the slot. ## The new failure mode, stated plainly A publication that would have succeeded on attempt eleven is abandoned. Ten consecutive failures at the 1 Hz floor is ~10 s; the give-up is logged at `error` with the provider's own message, so a 422 on an unpushed head ref is distinguishable from a 503 without reading the source. That is a bounded, visible, operator-recoverable outcome against an unbounded and silent one. ## Tests - MUST FIRE -- always-422 publication: `attempts > 5` first (the loop is really turning, and it passes on both sides of the fix), then the slot empties, the budget is spent once, the durable phase is `abandoned`, and `counters.done` stays unset. - MUST NOT FIRE -- ten failures then a success: still publishes, `done` reaches 1, and the exhaustion counter never moves. One field different from the must-fire case, which is its control. Fail-first verified against `origin/main` with the implementation reverted and the tests kept: the precondition passed (`attempts` climbed) and the wedge assertion failed naming the retained occupant -- `expected [ { uuid: 'uuid-902', key: 'AR-902', ... } ] to deeply equal []` -- i.e. the slot still pinned after 10 s. The must-not-fire case passed on `origin/main` too, so the must-fire failure is the missing bound and not the fixture. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(dispatch): key the publish budget per repository, not per work unit #440 review, codex P1. A team dispatch publishes one PR per implementer repository through a single lifecycle, and the drive's `publishing` branch iterates every implementer on every pass. A budget shared across them is wrong in BOTH directions: charged in common - one repository's ten transient failures make a single failure on the NEXT repository abandon the whole dispatch at eleven, which is the defect reported; refunded in common - a repository that succeeds on every pass zeroes the counter on every pass, so a repository that never succeeds can never reach the cap and spins forever, reintroducing the exact wedge this PR removes. The review offered "reset after each successful receipt" OR "track per implementer/repository". Those are not equivalent - the first is the refunded-in-common shape above - so this takes the second. `publishAttemptKey` is `<lifecycle key>::<repo>`; `::` cannot occur inside a dispatch lifecycle key (`github:owner/repo#n`, `linear:uuid`), so `#clearPublishAttempts`'s prefix scan cannot reach a neighbouring work unit. The per-implementer try/catch moves inside the loop so the charge knows which repository failed, the refund happens on that repository's own receipt, and exhausting any one repository's budget clears the whole work unit's keys before abandoning. The abandonment log now names the repo. Also pins the exact attempt count in the must-fire test (#440 review, CodeRabbit): one uncharged attempt from the agent-exit handler, ten charged retries through the drive, then the one that tips it over - 12. A budget quietly changed to 5 or 20 now fails the test instead of passing it. NO BEHAVIOURAL TEST FOR THE MULTI-REPO CASE, stated plainly rather than papered over. I built one and could not make it reach the code under test: in a team dispatch on a durable store, a failed publish is attempted exactly ONCE and no retry is ever re-armed (measured: pear attempted once, nothing further for 30 s, work unit still in flight). The fixture failed identically against both the shared-budget and per-repository implementations, so it discriminated nothing and shipping it would have been worse than shipping none. That non-retry looks like a second slot-holding defect on the multi-repo path and is reported separately rather than fixed here. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(test): restore the 590 test-file lines an earlier in-place edit truncated A scripted edit in this branch rebuilt `factory.test.ts` by string-slicing at a marker and dropped roughly 590 lines of unrelated suite along the way -- among them `PostSpawnReadFailureMount` and the `dispatchPhaseOccupiesSlot` import. The damage was committed and is why this branch collected 676 tests where `origin/main` collects 681. Caught by comparing full-suite runs rather than by any assertion: the branch reported 15 failures against the base's 1, and the FEWER-tests-than-main count is what identified it as file damage instead of a regression. The file is now `origin/main` plus the two added cases and nothing else -- 158 insertions, zero deletions -- and collects 683. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(dispatch): charge a throwing lifecycle save, and stop splitting a doc comment from its method Three review findings on #440. cubic P1 - a `#saveDispatchLifecycle` that THROWS after the PR was created sat outside the charged region, so it reached the uncharged generic re-arm and could spin forever on a `publishing` row: the same slot-holding wedge one layer down. The save now runs inside the try. Refunding also moves to after BOTH the publish and the save succeed - refunding on the publish alone would zero the budget on every pass of a permanently failing save, which would have made widening the try pointless. A `false` save is a lost lease rather than a failure and still returns without charging: another owner is driving the row, so there is nothing here still spinning to bound. cubic P3 - `#clearPublishAttempts` had been inserted between `#chargeReleaseAttempt` and its JSDoc, so the release budget's doc comment was documenting my helper and the release method was left undocumented. Both helpers move below `#chargeReleaseAttempt`. No behaviour change; it was a genuine misplacement and cubic was right to call it. cubic P3 - the must-fire test read the give-up log with `errors.at(-1)`, which assumes it is the last error the factory ever logs. `#abandonStuckDispatch` runs after it, so a later error line would have made the assertion inspect the wrong tuple or stringify `undefined`. Now indexed by message. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(dispatch): bound the terminal published save, and make the give-up logger-proof Two more review findings on #440, both cubic, both real. P1 - the terminal `#saveDispatchLifecycle(record, 'published')` sat outside any charged region. A throw there leaves the row in `publishing`, still holding the slot, and every retry reconciles the existing receipts cheaply, refunds each repository's budget because those steps really did succeed, and throws again: an unbounded spin on a work unit whose pull requests already exist. The budget key is now per STEP rather than per repository - one step per repository, plus `<published-save>` for the terminal one. `<` cannot occur in a repository name, so the two can never collide. P2 - `#abandonExhaustedPublish` spent the counter, logged, and only then abandoned. `this.#logger.error` is caller-supplied and can throw, so a throwing logger rejected the helper with the cleanup never run AND the budget reset, and the outer retry re-armed with a fresh ten attempts. Forever. This is the same hazard `#chargeReleaseAttempt` documents on the sibling path ("Cleanup is armed BEFORE anything that can throw"), which I had not carried across. It now abandons FIRST, spends the counter only once that has returned - so a throwing abandon retries the abandonment instead of restarting the budget - and the log is wrapped: losing the line is acceptable, re-arming the wedge it announces is not. TEST NOTES The P2 fix has a test: the injected logger throws on the give-up line, the row still abandons and the slot still frees, and `errorCalls > 0` proves the logger really did throw so the pass is not vacuous. The P1 fix ships WITHOUT one, stated rather than hidden. With the `published` save rejecting, the publication succeeds once and the lifecycle is never re-driven at all - one publish, one rejected save, no further attempt in 40s, work unit still in flight - so the bound under test is never reached and a fixture built on it would pass or fail for unrelated reasons. That non-re-arm is a defect in its own right; filed as #443, and I have added this single-repo reproduction to it, since it shows the issue is broader than the team-dispatch framing it was filed under. Also fixes a test that was relying on incidental ordering: because the abandonment now runs before the counter is spent, the batch can be observed empty a beat before `dispatchPublishRetriesExhausted` moves, so the must-fire case waits for the counter instead of reading it synchronously. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(test): remove a diagnostic line that a non-unique replace put in the wrong class A scripted diagnostic edit matched the FIRST `return await super.saveDispatchLifecycle(...)` in the file rather than the one in the class it was meant for, so `PublishedSaveFailsStore.phases.push(...)` landed inside `PausedAbandonStateStore` (#367's fixture). Removing the diagnostic test later took the class away and left the reference behind, which threw `ReferenceError: PublishedSaveFailsStore is not defined` from an unrelated fixture and made the #367 abandon-fence pair fail and then hang. This accounts for all four failures in the previous suite run, none of which were the helper reordering they appeared to indict. Second time in this branch that a scripted replace without a uniqueness assertion has damaged this file; the test-file diff against origin/main is now 241 insertions and ZERO deletions, which is the invariant I should have been checking after every scripted edit. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * fix(test): make the throwing-logger case actually reach the line it claims to pin #440 review, codex P2, at head. The test injected a logger that threw on EVERY error call, and codex is right that this never reaches the hazard under test: `#handleAgentExit`'s catch calls `#error` (factory.ts:11528) BEFORE `#scheduleDispatchLifecycleRetry` (:11529), so the very first failed publication threw out before any retry was armed and the budget could never be spent. The test was passing for a reason unrelated to the ordering it claimed to pin -- which is worse than not having it. The logger now throws ONLY on the give-up message. Everything else logs normally, so the retries arm, the budget exhausts, `#abandonExhaustedPublish` reaches its log line, and THAT is what throws. `giveUpLogCalls` is asserted at exactly 1, so the pass cannot be vacuous. Fail-first, properly, against the pre-fix ordering (clear, log unguarded, then abandon): AssertionError: expected [ { uuid: 'uuid-906', ... } ] to deeply equal [] i.e. the work unit is still IN FLIGHT and the slot was never released, because the throwing logger stopped `#abandonStuckDispatch` from ever running. That is cubic's P2 reproduced exactly, and it is what the previous version of this test could not have shown. Also raises the case's waits from 10s to 40s: eleven real drive passes exceeded the old budget intermittently, and the run that "passed" at 21.8s the first time had simply been lucky. Verified stable across two consecutive runs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f * docs(test): anchor the ordering rationale to symbols, not line numbers #440 review, cubic P3. The comment explaining why the injected logger throws only on the give-up line cited `factory.ts:11528 then :11529`. Those were accurate at that head, but any unrelated edit to `#handleAgentExit` silently breaks the reference and leaves a confident, wrong explanation in place. The invariant is the ORDERING - `#error` before `#scheduleDispatchLifecycleRetry` - so it now names those symbols instead. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01825Sb9ypfURoThHybLzgiL Session-Id: e6cb9e45-177b-40b6-b93f-40f7a6ca4b0f

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This was referenced Sep 2, 2026
fix(dispatch): reconcile a terminal lifecycle row against an issue that never went terminal #435
Merged
fix(dispatch): stop a dead placement from buying an 8x longer hold #433
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Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/main' into HEAD
ab1adac
Session-Id: 2cf7b74b-33d7-412d-8ec7-c99fd100e99a

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khaliqgant merged commit 68f36ef into mainSep 2, 2026
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khaliqgant deleted the fix/reclaim-occupied-slot-past-deadline branch September 2, 2026 21:22

This was referenced Sep 2, 2026
fix(dispatch): bound a PR publication that can never succeed, instead of pinning the only batch slot #440
Merged
[factory] A failed publish in a team dispatch is never retried, and the work unit holds its batch slot forever #443
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khaliqgant mentioned this pull request Sep 4, 2026
fix(github): read every rollup shape in the vacuous classifier; add the review-at-head CI check (#432) #469
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The outage

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Restart survival: reclaim, not clear-on-boot

The new failure mode, stated plainly

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