bench/tasks/in-progress/55-a-headless-run-is-one-turn-and-must-say-so.md

55 — A headless run gets one turn, and nothing tells the agent that

Status: In Progress Assignee: istos Priority: High — it costs a whole run and everything in it, and the condition that triggers it is getting more likely every week Type: Bug

A work agent finished its turn with the words "The suite is still running; I'll wait for the monitor rather than poll further." There is no monitor. A headless claude -p run ends when the model stops producing output, so ending a turn to wait ends the run — and this one ended with 314 lines of finished, passing work staged and never committed.

Context

What actually happened, on card 47 inside phase 53:

• The agent staged changes across AGENTS.md, manager/core/board.html, manager/core/httpd.py, a new tests/test_archive_chip.py and an edited tests/test_card_actions.py — then started the test suite and ended its turn to wait for it.
• The process exited 0 with no commits on task/47-…. The log is 80 bytes: that one sentence.
• Everything downstream behaved correctly. The board refused to move the card to review/ — an empty branch reaching review is a broken launch hiding — and the phase halted at 47 rather than skipping it, saying so in its ## Phase log.
• The work was fine. Run by hand afterwards: 37 tests in the two files it touched, then 875 tests, all passing, in that worktree.

Why waiting looked reasonable to the agent: that suite takes four minutes. 875 tests, 239 seconds. This morning it was 631 tests in about 105 seconds. At four minutes, backgrounding a run and waiting for it is a sensible-looking strategy for an agent that believes it will be resumed.

And nothing tells it otherwise. manager/core/prompts/work.md says to run the checks until they pass and to commit in clear, reviewable commits. It never says the run is a single non-interactive turn, that there is nobody to hand back to, or that uncommitted work dies with the process. The one place finality is stated is the NOT READY path — "end immediately with a reply whose FIRST line is exactly…" — which is about declining, not about the shape of the run.

Affected areas: manager/core/prompts/work.md first, and the same paragraph is owed to act-pr.md and review.md, which run the same way.

What to build

• Say what a run is, at the top of the prompt. One short paragraph: this is a single non-interactive turn; there is no human and no second chance; when the reply ends the process exits; anything not committed is lost, and the board judges the run by what is on the branch.
• Turn that into an instruction, not a warning. Commit before anything long-running, and commit again after it. A commit is cheap and a lost run is not — an agent that commits early can always improve on it in the same turn.
• Name the trap by name. Do not background a command and end the turn to wait for it; do not promise to come back to something. If a check takes minutes, run it in the foreground and wait inside the turn.
• The same paragraph in the other headless prompts. act-pr pushes and review posts a verdict; both lose everything the same way if the turn ends early.
• Check the marker contract still reads clearly once the paragraph is added — NOT READY: and the closing report are parsed from the same output, and the new text must not muddy where the first line goes.

Out of scope — tempting neighbours left alone:

• Making the runner resume a stalled agent, or giving an agent a second turn. One-shot is the design; the fix is telling it so.
• Rescuing uncommitted work automatically. Tempting, and wrong: the board judging a run by its commits is exactly what caught this.
• Changing what the definition-of-done checks are — see Notes.

Acceptance

• prompts/work.md states, before the task body, that the run is one non-interactive turn and that uncommitted work is lost when it ends.
• It instructs the agent to commit before long-running commands, and not to end a turn waiting on one.
• act-pr.md and review.md carry the same paragraph.
• tests/test_prompt_report_contract.py still passes — the four templates keep their identical closing-report block and their marker lines still parse.
• Edge case: the added text does not change where the first line of a NOT READY: reply must sit.

Notes

The recovered work from that run is committed on task/47-an-archive-button-on-the-card as 661dd89, by hand, unchanged from what the run left staged.

The four-minute suite is the other half of this, and it deserves its own card rather than a fix here. BOARD_AGENT_COMMANDS is python3 -m unittest, so every work agent runs everything — 875 tests now, and the number only goes up. A definition-of-done slow enough to change how an agent behaves is a problem that gets worse quietly: the prompt fix stops the agent walking away from it, but it does not make the wait shorter, and the next agent will still spend four minutes of its run watching a suite that mostly tests things it did not touch.