Implements fixes 1-3 of plans/2026-07-11-task-completion-safety-net.md.
Confirmed live that 50/50 production sessions never reached a terminal
status because the model almost never calls complete_task, even for
trivial single-tool Q&A turns SOUL.md explicitly calls out as needing it.
- Inline safety net (agent.go): a session that never called set_goal never
framed itself as a structured task, so its first plain-text turn-end IS
the task ending — auto-complete it there instead of leaving status stuck
at its creation default forever.
- Idle sweep (continue.go, new completion_nudges column): goal-bearing
sessions that stall get one nudge, then auto-close with outcome=partial
if the nudge goes unanswered, mirroring the pattern resumeSession already
uses for a different stuck-session failure mode.
Fix 4 (backfill of the 50 already-stuck live sessions) is deliberately
separate — deferred until this is deployed and verified live, per the
plan's implementation order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fix B3 of plans/2026-07-11-nomos-agent-code-review.md. resumeSession's retry
loop (used by both auto-continuation and panel-answered questions) already
retried once on a transient LLM failure, but if BOTH attempts came back
empty/erroring, the code just logged and returned — the task was left at
whatever status it already had (typically 'executing' or 'awaiting_input')
with no outcome, no operator-visible signal beyond an inert error line
buried in the transcript, and no way to tell a genuinely stuck task apart
from one quietly still working.
On permanent failure, now calls store.completeTask(outcome='failure', a
summary built from the error) so the task board reflects reality instead of
showing a task that looks perpetually in-progress. Uses context.Background()
for that write, matching resumeSession's own persistence pattern, since the
context that led to the failure may itself be in a bad state. This doesn't
prevent the operator from continuing to work the task via a fresh chat
message afterward — it only replaces silent hanging with a real status.
A full live induction of a permanent LLM outage would require breaking the
model/API-key config for the whole nomos container — too invasive for this
fix's priority. Verified instead that the new branch stays correctly dormant
on the happy path: ran a real ask_operator → panel-answer → resume cycle
end-to-end and confirmed the task landed at status='executing' with no
outcome set, proving the failure-handling code doesn't false-positive on a
normal successful resume.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fixes B1 and B2 of plans/2026-07-11-nomos-agent-code-review.md together,
since the right granularity for B1 in the auto-continuation worker turned
out to require B2's restructuring anyway (see below).
B1: grep -rn "recover()" cmd/nomos/ internal/mcp/ internal/httpapi/ returned
nothing before this — every explicitly-spawned goroutine (continuation
worker, resumed chat turns, async execution dispatch, the SSE listener, two
duplicate sshExec implementations' output-collector goroutines) crashed the
whole process on an unhandled panic, not just that one goroutine. More
consequential post-concurrency: more simultaneous unattended background work
means more surface area for one bad input to end every running task.
New internal/safego package: Go(label, fn) launches fn in a goroutine with a
recover-and-log wrapper. Applied at every bare `go` spawn site across the
three packages. Two sites needed bespoke handling instead of the generic
helper because their callers block on a channel and a silent recover would
just make them hang until timeout: sshExec's output-collector goroutine (two
near-identical copies, internal/mcp/server.go and internal/httpapi/phase3.go)
and httpapi's ListenAndServe goroutine — both now recover AND send a
synthetic error result so the waiting select unblocks immediately instead of
waiting out the full timeout.
httpapi's sseListener got extra treatment: its per-notification handling was
extracted into handleNotification with its own recover, so a panic decoding
ONE malformed pg_notify payload can't kill the listener goroutine for every
connected SSE client — the outer goroutine spawn only needs to guard the
connection setup/reconnect code around it.
B2: cmd/nomos/continue.go's processContinuations used to run every pending
continuation SEQUENTIALLY in a plain for loop, in the SAME goroutine as the
ticker — meaning (a) task B's continuation waited for task A's full (up to
10-minute) resumed turn to finish first, undercutting this session's earlier
concurrency work on exactly the path autonomous tasks depend on most, and
(b) an unrecovered panic anywhere in that call chain didn't just crash the
process (B1) — even WITH B1's recovery wrapped only at the top-level worker
spawn, the panic would still unwind the ENTIRE ticker-loop goroutine,
silently ending auto-continuation for every task until nomos restarted.
Fixed by spawning each pending item via safego.Go individually: real
parallelism, and a bad item can now only ever take down its own goroutine.
Added internal/safego/safego_test.go: TestGo_RecoversPanic is the concrete
proof — a deliberate panic inside Go() that would otherwise crash the whole
test binary; reaching the assertion after it IS the evidence recovery works.
Verified live against the rebuilt containers: full chat turn round-tripped
correctly (hostname lookup, 2 iterations, normal completion) — no regression
from threading safego.Go through the tool-dispatch/continuation paths.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fix 1 of plans/2026-07-11-concurrent-task-execution.md — the safety-critical
one. The assent window (and destructive window) were keyed purely by agent
id ("assent_window.agent:<uuid>"). With one agent:nomos entity serving every
concurrent task, this meant approving Task A's plan opened a window that ANY
concurrently-running task's config-mutation/destructive actions could also
ride, auto-executing without their own approval.
- store.go / agent.go: assentWindowActive/openAssentWindow and
destructiveWindowActive/openDestructiveWindow/destructiveWindowKey all gain
a sessionID parameter; keys become
"assent_window.agent:<id>.session:<sessionID>" and
"destructive_window.agent:<id>.target:<slug>.session:<sessionID>". Missing
session id fails closed (no window) rather than falling back to the old
agent-wide key.
- continue.go: the auto-continuation worker's window check moved from once-
per-batch to once-per-pending-item, scoped to that item's own session —
it was previously checking ONE agent-wide window for a batch that can span
multiple tasks.
- agent.go tool-dispatch: injects `_session_id` into a COPY of the wire args
sent to the MCP server (never into the args used for the emitted/logged/
persisted tool call, and never part of any tool's declared InputSchema —
invisible to the model) so the gating checks on the OTHER side of the
process boundary know which task is asking.
- internal/mcp/server.go: assentWindowActive/destructiveWindowActive/
classifyAndGate gain the same sessionID parameter, read from
args["_session_id"] at the three call sites (request_execution's
apt_upgrade/pct_create branches, and the shared classifyAndGate used by
restart/pct_exec/systemctl/run).
Verified against the live stack with the exact scenario from the plan: opened
an assent window for session A only, then called `run` with an identical
config-mutation command for session A (window open) and session B (same
agent, no window). A auto-ran (execution status completed); B correctly
queued for approval (pending_approval) instead of bleeding through — proven
at both the MCP response text and the executions table.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The last backend piece: when the agent hits a decision only the operator can
make, it surfaces a structured question instead of guessing or stalling.
- ask_operator(prompt, why?, options?, context_entities?): nomos-local tool
that records a session_questions row, moves the task to awaiting_input, emits
question.raised, and ENDS the turn (the agent loop returns after it, so the
agent can't barrel past its own question). The prompt becomes the assistant's
visible message so the question also shows inline in the transcript.
- Two resume paths, both close the question + emit question.answered + return
the task to executing:
- Panel: POST /sessions/{id}/questions/{qid}/answer → resumes the agent in the
background with the answer injected (reusing the continuation machinery,
refactored continueSession → resumeSession). Returns 202; the reply lands via
message polling.
- Chat reply: the next chat message on a task with an open question IS the
answer — auto-closed in handleChat; the turn itself is the resume.
Verified end-to-end: forcing a decision paused the task at awaiting_input with
the structured question (prompt/why/options/entities); a panel answer resumed
the agent (it acknowledged host:strong and continued); a plain chat reply
auto-closed a second question. Cleanup + tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Operator: "I'd like to be able to see in the chat what the agent is actually
running, right now I just wait while nothing happens." Two compounding gaps:
1. The auto-continuation worker (cmd/nomos/continue.go) had zero live push —
its result only appeared on a manual page reload, so approving a plan and
watching the chat looked completely dead even while the agent was actively
working.
2. Even with polling, continueSession only persisted ONE message at the very
end of a continuation — a continuation that runs several tool calls before
concluding would still show total silence for however long that took.
Fixed both:
- web/src/lib/stores/chat.ts: polls the current session's messages every 3s
between turns (never while a live stream owns the message list) and merges
in anything new. Started after a live turn ends and when a session loads;
stopped on new-chat/session-switch.
- cmd/nomos/store.go: insertMessageReturningID/updateMessage — lets a message
be created as a placeholder and updated in place.
- cmd/nomos/continue.go: continueSession now inserts a placeholder the
instant it starts (renders as the existing "thinking" dots — immediate
feedback that something is happening) and updates that SAME row after
EVERY tool call, not just at the end. A poll within ~3s of any tool call
landing shows it — individual `run` commands appear as the agent issues
them, not just the final rolled-up summary.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Verified live: the new auto-continuation worker (previous commit) worked end
to end for the happy path (provision -> auto-verify -> report success, zero
operator ticks). But testing a failure-recovery case (a destroy that failed
because the container was still running) surfaced a real bug: continueSession's
emit closure only captured "text" events, so when chatWith ended the turn on
an "error" event (LLM returned an empty/refusal response, internal retry also
empty), the worker persisted a completely blank, uninformative "auto" message
— no sign anything had gone wrong, undermining observability of the very
mechanism just built.
- Capture "error" events and, if the turn produced no text/tool_calls at all,
persist an explanatory placeholder instead of blank.
- Add one outer retry of the whole chatWith call when the first attempt
produces nothing — the principle behind this whole feature ("don't give up
on the first error") should apply to the continuation mechanism itself, not
just the homelab commands it's continuing.
Also verified live: recovery-from-failure works via the normal chat path once
prompted, and cleaned up the test container.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The root cause behind "the agent stops at the first error and doesn't recover":
provisioning executions run ASYNCHRONOUSLY (pct_create fires the SSH work in a
goroutine and returns "running" immediately), so the agent's turn ENDS before
the result exists. The agent literally isn't running when the step fails — it
can't react to a failure it never observes. The only thing that fed results
back was the operator typing "continue" after every async step: the human was
the event loop. (In the flagged 18-message session the operator typed
continue/proceed/?? eight times while the agent correctly diagnosed each failure
but couldn't advance a step on its own.)
This makes the system the event loop instead:
- migrations/017: nomos_plan_executions links each gated execution to the chat
session that started it.
- cmd/nomos: after a tool result, any "execution <uuid>" it started is linked
to the session. A background worker (continue.go) polls for those executions
reaching a terminal state and — while the agent has an open assent window (an
approved plan is in flight) — re-invokes the agent with the result
("execution X completed/failed: <result>"), so it proceeds to the next step
or diagnoses+fixes the failure, with no operator tick. Guarded against loops
(mark-continued before running) and bounded by the 30-min window.
- chatWith(): chat() variant that injects the finished-execution note after
replayed history without persisting a fake user turn.
- DecideApproval: approving a step by ANY route (button or chat-assent) now
opens the assent window, so auto-continuation works regardless of how the
operator approved — previously only typing "go ahead" opened it.
- SOUL: the agent is told it will be auto-re-invoked when async steps finish —
don't poll get_execution_status, don't wait for "continue"; end the turn and
keep going step by step until the goal is verified or a genuine blocker.
This is the root fix, not another per-command patch: you can't enumerate every
failure of an unbounded action space, but you can give the agent a loop that
observes each result and adapts — because "do anything" always includes "the
first attempt failed."
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
