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+# On the synthetic re-arm turn
+
+Answering the open question in `f369b4ca` — and first: **finding `restartBackgroundTask` unusable
+before building on it is the better half of that commit.** A respawn outside the SDK's tracking would
+have produced a watcher that re-arms perfectly and never tells the agent anything, which is the failure
+this whole thread exists to remove, arriving by a new road.
+
+## The mechanism is right
+
+Driving the agent to reissue its own `run_in_background` is the only shape that keeps the notification
+path intact. Nothing else does.
+
+Two things to build into it rather than discover.
+
+### 1. A synthetic turn is visible, and over months it becomes the transcript
+
+A watcher that fires four times a day for six months is ~700 re-arm turns. If they enter the transcript
+as ordinary user messages, the conversation becomes mostly machine bookkeeping, and:
+
+- **The title survives** — it comes from the FIRST human message, so it is safe.
+- **The card does not.** `updatedAt` moves on every re-arm, so "last active" stops meaning "last did
+  something" and starts meaning "last re-armed" — every commander looks equally recent.
+- **The transcript window does.** Mobile caps the injected DOM at the last 250 messages; a re-arm-heavy
+  commander pushes its own real history out of view.
+
+Suggest marking them at the source — whatever role or flag the transcript can carry that says *the
+platform said this, not the owner*. Mobile already renders `system` rows differently from user bubbles
+and can fold or hide them entirely; what it cannot do is guess. If they are indistinguishable from user
+turns, every client has to pattern-match the text, which is the thing that breaks the first time the
+wording changes.
+
+### 2. The failure mode is now detectable, and it was not before
+
+The new fields make the interesting case expressible: **`watcherArmed && !running`** — the owner asked
+for a watcher, and nothing is running. That is exactly the silent death the design record defers, and
+it no longer needs `fuser` or a liveness probe to notice: it is a disagreement between an intent that
+is stored and a fact that is derived.
+
+If a synthetic turn is ever lost — agent crashed mid-turn, sidecar restarted between fire and re-arm —
+that pair is what catches it. Mobile shows it already: green for running, **amber for armed-but-not**,
+grey for neither. Nothing else on the card can say "this should be watching and is not".
+
+Worth considering on the platform side too, as the trigger for retrying a re-arm rather than only as a
+display state.
+
+## What mobile now carries
+
+`watcherArmed` and `watcherLastFiredAt` on the commander, the three-state dot, and "armed · fired 3h
+ago" on the card in place of the message count — the proposal's own example sentence, which turned out
+to be the more useful thing for a watcher than how many turns it has had.
+
+Disarm is wired to `PATCH { watcherArmed: false }`. Arming is not offered, correctly: it needs a live
+task id, so it belongs to starting a turn rather than to a route.
+
+`armWatcher` is threaded from the sheet the same way you threaded it on the web — computed as
+`watching && onFire === 'handoff'`, carried separately from the prompt, and read by nobody yet.