Cursor-agent puts prompts on argv, so oversized company/report handoffs hit
OS ARG_MAX, crash the card as FAILED, and reconcile kept minting new Report
attempts forever. Spill large Cursor prompts to a workspace file and hold the
report chain after consecutive failures.
Root-cause fix for the project-4444 class of deadlocks: any FAILED/
CANCELLED work item with downstream dependents used to block its whole
tree forever, because the advancement gate required all dependencies to
be APPROVED and nothing ever propagated or triaged failures.
Settlement mechanism (work_item_transition.py):
- compute doomed set (FAILED/CANCELLED seeds contagious through hard
deps); settlement-released cards are treated as alive
- three-way advancement gate: all-approved (unchanged) / settled-with-
failures releases the nearest decision-capable card (manager parent ->
failure-triage synthesis turn, rollup delivery/aggregate -> READY)
with an atomic dependency_settlement stamp; released cards never
oscillate back
- claim/park/resume/dispatcher-tick all honor the stamp: runnable gates
admit settled failed+stuck deps, parking excludes settled deps and
re-arms triage when a failure raced the park, engine resume no longer
re-locks released cards, the dispatcher tick releases rollup cards
created after the failure
- settlement cascade: once the settled card is APPROVED, stuck children
the manager did not rebuild are cancelled (transitive closure over
stamped stuck seeds, retried until every cancel lands)
- info-class deps never block settlement; adaptive runnable gate now
shares DEPENDENCY_CLASS_DEFAULT with the release gates
Dispatch guard (company_mode.py):
- NO_DELEGATION_JUSTIFICATION parsing tolerates markdown decoration
(bold/lists/quotes/full-width colon) and rejects placeholder echoes
across all artifact/metadata/content channels
- retries exhausted no longer FAILs the work item: dispatch is a soft
constraint, so the turn output is accepted as normal completion and
annotated via manager_dispatch_guard_unresolved; the reminder loop is
unchanged, and the mutation flag is now reset per turn so one past
delegation can never mute future reminders
- manager board context now surfaces failed/cancelled children with
their preserved output and pending-cancellation stuck list so the
triage turn can rebuild, accept partial results, or escalate
Self-produced delegation output goes through review (persisted fact,
single predicate):
- the DONE transition classifies what a dispatch/intake/plan turn
actually delivered from store ground truth (live children => delegated,
none => self_produced) and persists turn_output_kind/-source on the
WorkItem
- is_manager_reviewable_turn honors the persisted marker, so the DONE
routing, report spawn, report completion and recovery scans all read
the same fact — this closes a pre-existing hole where
NO_DELEGATION_JUSTIFICATION output auto-approved with no review at all
- escalation requires a real agent manager above; top seats reporting to
the human owner keep auto-approve (covered by final delivery's human
acceptance) instead of minting unclaimable review cards
- dispatcher tick reconciles reviewable cards stuck in
AWAITING_MANAGER_REVIEW with no live report/review card by rebuilding
the report card idempotently (legacy DBs, crash windows)
Verified: 4444 tasks.db replay unwedges end to end; real-store
report->review chain exercised without lifecycle mocks (mutation check
confirms the tests bite); full suite failure set identical to a
same-session HEAD baseline run (all remaining failures pre-existing or
environment flakes reproduced at HEAD).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mao Weiming