todo: what tonight's deploy work left behind, and two items it closed

Closed:

- fleet/an-orchestrator-that-acts-on-every-server-at — built, and as none of the three shapes it
  proposed. Not a script, not a screen, not a chat capability: an agent handed a written procedure and a
  server list it has to read rather than one baked into it. All three verified facts in the item earned
  their place; two things it did not anticipate are now new items.
- fleet/a-way-to-mark-a-commit-this-one-ships-so-a — built as a TAG, which the item explicitly ruled out.
  The owner reversed it, and the argument that changed his mind is recorded: a codeword can be written by
  accident, because every document about deploying contains it, so the trigger needs rules about where in
  a subject line it sits and a rule like that is one somebody eventually gets wrong.

Opened, all from tonight and all with the evidence attached:

- a deploy verifies pm2 and not that the app serves anything — the commander raised this against itself
- the commander cannot finish its own host, so one machine is always a build behind
- the watcher loop is rewritten by an agent every arming, so its correctness is re-rolled each time
- plugins:update restarts every sidecar, so a report naming only officer understates what moved
- an agent spawned by a background job is invisible in the UI while being perfectly readable
- AskUserQuestion can fail to parse its own call
- a commander opened from /chat loses its commander controls, because isCommander comes from the screen
  rather than the session

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

todo/fleet/plugins-update-restarts-every-sidecar-so-the.md

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+id: fleet/plugins-update-restarts-every-sidecar-so-the
+title: '`plugins:update` restarts every sidecar, so the report understates what moved'
+theme: fleet
+status: open
+created: 2026-08-21
+date_source: stated
+order: 7
+---
+
+**`bun run plugins:update` restarts sidecars itself**, printing `sidecar: started` per plugin. On `alpha`
+that is twelve processes bouncing during step 3 — before the plan's own restart step, and not something
+any plan asked for.
+
+Nothing is broken and this is not new behaviour. The problem is honesty: a deploy report whose "restarted"
+column reads `officer` is describing one restart when thirteen happened, and the whole value of these
+reports is that they can be trusted about what moved.
+
+Two ways out, and they are not the same decision:
+
+- **Make the report accurate** — the plan format grows a note, or the commander reads `restart_time` for
+  every process rather than only the ones it restarted. Cheap, and it is the honest minimum.
+- **Make the script not do it** — a `--no-restart` flag, with the deploy restarting what the plan names.
+  That is the better shape (a plan that says "restart `officer` only" should mean it) but it is a change
+  to something that works, and a plugin whose sidecar is not restarted after an update may well be broken
+  in a way nobody notices until later.
+
+Do the first regardless. The second is a real design call.