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.
