The --plan-file check landed on the one path a human is watching. The three
--plan-mode loads read a report written by another agent with nobody watching,
and had no content check at all: find_report only tests that the path exists.
An empty or whitespace-only report therefore blanked current_plan in silence.
Phase 2's `if self.current_plan` then flipped the prompt to self-planning and
the run finished rc 0, having paid for a planner job, a Creator challenge and a
refine job and thrown the result away. The escalation refine was worse: it has
no guard, so the correction prompt asserted "follow the updated plan below" and
carried nothing.
All four loads share _plan_text() now - a plan is a readable regular file with
text in it - and each caller says what None means. An empty initial plan stops
the run instead of demoting it, and an empty refine warns and keeps the plan it
already has, which is still good. Those two together leave the escalation
prompt unable to claim a plan it does not carry, so it needs no new branch.
Found by the Creator's challenge to the plan (job 0f63ac1d), sustained by the
Planner as revision 1.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>