Honour a declared pause for a live worker, and archive finished-task clutter #14

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john merged 1 commit from fm/parked-cadence-and-prune into main 2026-08-21 20:16:32 +00:00

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john commented 2026-08-21 19:42:12 +00:00

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Two causes of the same symptom: firstmate re-notifying about work that is finished and parked.

The cadence fix. The watcher never applied the long PAUSE_RESURFACE_SECS cadence to a worker whose agent was still alive. pause_state_class consulted liveness before the declaration, so an alive parked worker returned none on every pass and was re-surfaced every STALE_ESCALATE_SECS instead. Thirteen parked workers turned that into a continuous stream of notifications. An authoritative running pipeline still outranks the declaration, and a pane FIRST sighting still surfaces immediately, so a live external-decision gate is never hidden behind the long cadence.

The retention sweep. Nothing pruned data/<id>/ folders or state/ markers after teardown: 188 folders and 1391 state files had accumulated, nearly all for tasks torn down weeks earlier, and orphaned turn-end markers kept generating wakes for tasks that no longer exist. bin/fm-prune-state.sh archives them - it never deletes, never touches a task that still has metadata, and never touches the durable home records.

Both regressions were proven red. With the cadence fix removed the new test surfaces the parked pane; with the sweep neutered its test finds the report unarchived.

Verified locally: full tests/fm-watch-triage.test.sh suite passes, tests/fm-prune-state.test.sh passes, shellcheck clean. Observed in production for two hours before this PR: 45 minutes of silence followed by correctly-labelled hourly rechecks, replacing a notification every four minutes.

Two causes of the same symptom: firstmate re-notifying about work that is finished and parked. **The cadence fix.** The watcher never applied the long `PAUSE_RESURFACE_SECS` cadence to a worker whose agent was still alive. `pause_state_class` consulted liveness before the declaration, so an alive parked worker returned `none` on every pass and was re-surfaced every `STALE_ESCALATE_SECS` instead. Thirteen parked workers turned that into a continuous stream of notifications. An authoritative running pipeline still outranks the declaration, and a pane FIRST sighting still surfaces immediately, so a live external-decision gate is never hidden behind the long cadence. **The retention sweep.** Nothing pruned `data/<id>/` folders or `state/` markers after teardown: 188 folders and 1391 state files had accumulated, nearly all for tasks torn down weeks earlier, and orphaned turn-end markers kept generating wakes for tasks that no longer exist. `bin/fm-prune-state.sh` archives them - it never deletes, never touches a task that still has metadata, and never touches the durable home records. **Both regressions were proven red.** With the cadence fix removed the new test surfaces the parked pane; with the sweep neutered its test finds the report unarchived. Verified locally: full `tests/fm-watch-triage.test.sh` suite passes, `tests/fm-prune-state.test.sh` passes, shellcheck clean. Observed in production for two hours before this PR: 45 minutes of silence followed by correctly-labelled hourly rechecks, replacing a notification every four minutes.

john added 1 commit 2026-08-21 19:42:12 +00:00

fix(watch): honour a declared pause for a live worker, and archive finished-task clutter ... c6ffb8dc49

Two causes of the same symptom: firstmate re-notifying about work that is
finished and parked.

The watcher never applied the long PAUSE_RESURFACE_SECS cadence to a worker
whose agent was still alive. `pause_state_class` consulted liveness before the
declaration, so an alive parked worker returned `none` on every pass and was
re-surfaced every STALE_ESCALATE_SECS instead. Thirteen parked workers turned
that into a continuous stream of notifications. An authoritative running
pipeline still outranks the declaration, and a pane's FIRST sighting still
surfaces immediately, so a live external-decision gate is never hidden behind
the long cadence.

Nothing pruned `data/<id>/` folders or `state/` markers after teardown either:
188 folders and 1391 state files had accumulated, nearly all for tasks torn down
weeks earlier, and orphaned turn-end markers kept generating wakes for tasks
that no longer exist. `bin/fm-prune-state.sh` archives them - it never deletes,
never touches a task that still has metadata, and never touches the durable home
records.

Both regressions fail red without their fix: the cadence test surfaces the
parked pane, and the sweep test finds the report unarchived.

john merged commit 8c2056d4fa into main 2026-08-21 20:16:32 +00:00

john deleted branch fm/parked-cadence-and-prune 2026-08-21 20:16:32 +00:00

john referenced this pull request from a commit 2026-08-21 20:16:33 +00:00

Honour a declared pause for a live worker, and archive finished-task clutter (#14)

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