watcher wraps one `herdr agent wait` barrier and observes only; it never
concludes. The live contract is encoded rather than described: the timeout
parameter is named timeout_ms because herdr counts milliseconds, --until is
always passed explicitly since omitting it silently drops `working`, and a
non-zero exit is read from stderr because stdout is empty by contract.
A timeout counts as healthy. The socket answered and the state simply did not
change; treating that as a failure would make an idle agent look unreachable.
Only a matched snapshot becomes evidence, so a timeout can never be mistaken for
an observation of agent state.
Backoff doubles from 1s to a 16s ceiling and drops the cached snapshot on
failure. Reasoning from state captured before a gap is exactly what would make a
disconnect look like a completion, which is why the contract answer there is
hold_reconnect.
store keeps dispatch and attribution evidence outside the registry. The job
record carries none of attempt_id, agent_session_uuid or
pane_process_generation, phase 1 froze its schema, and this phase may not write
the registry at all. Keeping the evidence here lets shadow mode carry full
attribution while the registry stays untouched; promoting these fields is a 2b
decision. The execution anchor starts false because acknowledging a dispatch is
not evidence that the attempt ran.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UrDNJkHmm18uu7n7JwV5Qd
GodopuandClaude Opus 5
b49af56c3c