Defense-in-depth for the spawn_agent human-role chokepoint (d31d6719).
The chokepoint structurally guarantees no CEO/prompter/secretary container
can ever spawn — every dispatcher goes through spawn_agent. But two
dispatchers resolve an arbitrary assigned_to and spawn it with only a
None/unknown-role filter, so a human-assigned task would reach the
chokepoint and RAISE: caught by the per-dispatcher try/except, but it
aborts that dispatcher's whole tick (stalling other respawns behind the
mis-assigned task) and error-logs every cycle. The other dispatchers are
already safe by whitelist/hardcoded slug (blocker_resolver_slug returns
None for non-PM/non-BOARD; escalation/approval use whitelists; marketing
and audit hardcode their non-human slug).
- _claimed_task_needs_agent: return None for a CEO/prompter/secretary
assignee — no container to respawn, and do NOT release a human-owned
task to pending (that would re-route it to a PM). Leave it for the human.
- _dispatch_pm_review_work (assigned branch): skip a human-only assignee
so a CEO-assigned awaiting_pm_review task neither spawns nor aborts the
dispatcher's tick.
Audited all target-iterating dispatchers; only these two lacked a filter.
Regression tests cover both skips.
A live 2026-06-27 incident saw a CEO agent container spawned. Root cause:
_dispatch_a2a_work iterates every A2A/notification target and spawns it
with no human-role filter, and _is_agent_active('ceo') is always false
(the CEO is never a container), so the 'skip if active' check could never
protect the CEO. Any CEO-addressed notification (board handoff, escalation)
launched a CEO container — the system acting as the human CEO: a trust
violation. The CEO is the human operator; intake (prompter) and secretary
are human-driven chats launched through their own dedicated guarded paths
(_spawn_intake_container / _spawn_secretary_container), never spawn_agent.
Fix: a single chokepoint guard at the top of spawn_agent refuses
Role.CEO / PROMPTER / SECRETARY (raises AgentReadinessError + logs). This
structurally covers every dispatcher present and future, since they all go
through spawn_agent. Plus a defense-in-depth skip in _dispatch_a2a_work so
a human-role target never even calls in (avoids error-log spam; the
notification stays for the human to read in the panel).
Safe: the dedicated human-spawn paths do not route through spawn_agent.
Regression tests: spawn_agent refuses ceo/intake-1/secretary-1, does NOT
refuse a real agent; _dispatch_a2a_work skips CEO/intake/secretary targets
and still spawns real-agent + mixed-target cases.
Renn F