Andre wants this implemented, prompt and code, before the first real tests.
The argument is the evidence from running one: every mistake made was mechanical,
not judgemental — two watchers alive at once, firing on the agent's own push,
forgetting to re-baseline. Those are protocol steps that must happen every cycle,
and a model is the wrong thing to hold a protocol across turns when the failure is
invisible: a watcher that stopped being re-armed looks exactly like one that has not
fired yet.
So the harness owns the loop — re-arm from the post-action baseline (which makes
draining automatic rather than remembered), one watcher per job, do not fire on the
agent's own writes, and know the difference between stopped and died. The preamble
stops describing a loop and promises one instead, in a sentence, so the model does
not invent its own to fill the gap — which is what happened tonight.
And the state belongs on the commander row: a card can say "armed, last fired 3h
ago", which derived running cannot, and a row survives an agent that is in a new
session or out of context. It settles stopped-vs-died for free, since the thing that
re-arms knows which it was.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>