Its own first test caught this: the commander armed a perfectly good watcher, established a baseline
correctly, and wrote no loop-pid — so deleting it would have left the loop running.
The block was composed into the system preamble, which `createSession` builds ONCE, on a conversation's
first turn. For a commander that is exactly the turn where the block cannot exist: no command_hq_sessions
row, no transcript id, so `commanderBlock` returns null. Every later turn reuses the session and never
rebuilds the preamble. So a commander never received it at all — the "first turn gets no block" limitation I
closed with a rule was really "no turn ever gets it".
It rides `effectivePrompt` now: the string the model sees, as against `displayText` which the transcript
shows. Same seam the background-job dialog already uses for its hidden preamble, so nothing new — the agent
gets the paths without them appearing in the conversation. Once per session, on the first turn where the
block resolves, and it stays in the conversation's history from then on.
`briefedSessions` is in memory, so a restart re-briefs. That is the safe direction: a few hundred tokens on
one turn against a commander that was never told and therefore cannot be stopped.
The preamble path is removed rather than left dormant — a dead branch that reads as the mechanism is how this
went unnoticed in the first place.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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