The first watcher had an unbounded retry in it. A release whose deploy failed left no .done file, so the
next poll two minutes later spawned a fresh headless agent, and the one after that, all night, each one
costing money. The loop was careful and its logging was honest; the defect was structural.
It is structural because the loop is written FRESH by an agent every time one arms. A rule that lives only
in the prompt gets re-implemented from scratch each time, and the wrong implementation is the one that
looks right: test the .done file. That file only exists on success, so testing it is exactly the retry
storm.
So scripts/deploy-claim.sh owns it. `claim <version>` exits 0 once and 1 for ever after, whatever became
of the attempt that held it — a failed release is not retried, it is looked at. Handing the claim back is
`rm -rf` by a person, on purpose; a loop cannot undo its own claim, which is what makes the storm
impossible rather than unlikely.
Three choices in it worth keeping:
- `mkdir` is the claim. One atomic syscall that both tests and takes, with no window between checking and
acting — two pollers a second apart is not hypothetical when a watcher gets restarted.
- Bash, not bun. The thing that stops a retry storm must not need a healthy checkout; a deploy that dies
on `bun install` is precisely when it has to work.
- A version is digits and dots or it is refused. It arrives off a git tag and is concatenated into a path.
A pre-existing .done with no claim beside it still counts as deployed, so deploy/2026.08.21.01 — rolled
out by hand before any of this existed — is not re-attempted.
docs/servers.md corrected from the commander's own report, which was right and specific: on macbookpro
APPEND /opt/homebrew/bin for bun rather than replacing the PATH (this file said "do not help the PATH",
which is right for pm2 and is what made plugins:update fail there), `ls` is aliased to an eza that is not
installed, plugins:update bounces every sidecar before the plan's own restart step, and fofos cannot
publish affordances for what is probably the same ownership problem as its capabilities sync.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
