Two gaps found by auditing spec against code, the second created by
7b landing the harness without its boot-time half.
**The harness was not connected to anything.** Only a live test
constructed a Delegation; A12's failure-count trigger still gated to
the human, which A13 describes as the fallback rather than the path.
Consecutive command failures now hand the sub-task to the delegate,
with the failures in the brief so it need not rediscover what the
local model learned the hard way. A usable handback lets the local
loop carry on; anything else escalates, because a cap breach leaves a
half-edited tree.
**A3 step 5 was unimplemented.** A crash mid-delegation failed safe —
boot gated on "restarted mid-EXECUTING" — but always gated, even on
the clean cut the spec says should resume, and left the branch orphaned
because _abandon only runs while the process lives.
- A delegation now records an intent before the branch exists, and
settles it whichever way the delegation ends; an aborted delegation
is a finished one, and leaving it pending would make the next boot
believe work was still in flight
- delegation_verdict implements the clean-cut test as an observable
check, never model self-assessment: settled if a completion follows
the start, absent if the branch was never created, gate on a
tool_call with no recorded result, resume otherwise
- recover() sweeps at boot, announcing a resume with a notice rather
than a question, since a clean cut needs no decision from the
operator, and leaving an unclean one pending so the generic sweep
gates on it
- resume() continues the same delegation rather than starting a
second: no new branch, no second delegation_started, because A10
defines a session as the delegation, not the process lifetime
Honest limit, stated in the code: "the branch sits at the expected
commit" is approximated by the branch existing and carrying the work,
since per-turn shas are not recorded in the log, so a branch rewritten
underneath us would go undetected.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A frontier model receives a scoped sub-task, works autonomously with
full tool access, and hands back; the local loop reads the handback
note and the file state, never the reasoning.
- Branch at delegation start, and abort discards it. That required
committing each turn's work onto the branch: without commits,
deleting a branch discards nothing, so "abort discards the work"
was a comforting phrase rather than a fact. The caller's own
in-flight changes are committed to their branch first, so an abort
cannot destroy work nobody delegated
- Hard caps on turns and wall clock; a breach is a defined failure
return, and its result is not usable, so the caller gates rather
than resuming on a half-edited tree
- Every event is checkpointed as it arrives, so a crash mid-delegation
leaves the branch at a known commit and a truthful transcript
- Handback is validated locally: blank fields or a non-boolean success
flag are refused and the delegation continues rather than accepting
a useless note
Two failure modes found by running it against a real model:
- A success claim with nothing changed was accepted. The handback plus
file state is the entire interface back, so a note describing work
that does not exist is worse than no note. Success now requires a
successful mutating tool call; reporting failure still does not,
since "this is impossible" is a legitimate finding
- The delegate invented the absolute path /workspace, wrote there, ran
its tests there, and handed back truthfully — with the repo empty
and git seeing nothing. Writes outside the workspace are now refused
with a message naming the real root, and both prompts state where
the workspace is instead of leaving the model to guess. This is not
sandboxing: work outside the repo is invisible to git, so the
milestone would publish an empty PR
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dongarandClaude Opus 5