oikos/plans/2026-07-11-task-completion-safety-net.md

Task completion safety net: every live task is stuck "Running"

Status: In Progress — 2026-07-11. Fixes 1-3 implemented, built, tested (go build ./..., go test ./cmd/nomos/...), and committed (3b9c75f). Not yet deployed or verified live. Fix 4 (backfill of the 50 already-stuck live sessions) intentionally not started — per the implementation order below, it needs 1-3 deployed and verified first.

Scope

Fix the root cause of a production-wide defect found while UI-testing 2026-07-11-ui-review-ia-usability.md: every session on the live task board shows as "Running" forever. Traced through cmd/nomos/ and confirmed against the running database — this is not a frontend bug (the board correctly reflects real agent_sessions.status values). It's an agent-behavior gap: the model almost never calls the lifecycle tools (set_goal / propose_plan / complete_task) that the task-board feature (shipped today, done/2026-07-11-goal-oriented-chat-control-panel.md) depends on to know a task is finished.

Evidence

Queried the live nomos API directly (curl localhost:8092/sessions and per-session transcripts) against the running mac-mini stack:

• 50/50 live sessions: 49 active, 1 planning. Zero have ever reached executing, awaiting_input, done, or failed.
• Across all 50 sessions: set_goal called once. propose_plan called zero times. complete_task called zero times.
• The dominant pattern (43/50 sessions, 2-message transcripts) is a single quick exchange: operator asks something narrow ("what's the hostname of lxc:caddy?"), the model runs one read tool (run hostname), answers in plain text, and the turn ends — no lifecycle tool call at all. This is exactly the case nomos/SOUL.md:105-109 calls out by name ("a trivial read-only task... is a degenerate case... answer it and complete_task with a one-line summary") — the instruction exists and is explicit, and the model skips it anyway, consistently.
• The one session that did call set_goal (a fleet health check) did substantial real research (get_health_summary, get_state_snapshot, get_signal_history, list_lxcs), gave the operator a full structured answer, and then also just stopped — no propose_plan, no complete_task. Status: stuck at planning since 2026-07-11T11:35, still showing "Running" on the board.

This means the board's "N Running / 0 Done / 0 Failed" isn't a fluke or an edge case — it's the default outcome for essentially every task the system has ever run. The feature as designed (terminal state is 100% dependent on the model remembering to call one specific tool) doesn't hold up against real model behavior, even with an explicit prompt instruction already in place.

Where this lives in the code

cmd/nomos/agent.go's chatWith has exactly one place a turn ends with a plain-text answer and no tool calls:

// agent.go:359-368
if len(msg.ToolCalls) == 0 {
    emit(agentEvent{Type: "text", Data: msg.Content, SessionID: sessionID})
    emit(agentEvent{Type: "done", ...})
    return
}

This is reached for the trivial-Q&A case (a turn that made zero or a few read-only tool calls this iteration, then answered in text) and is where 43/50 of the stuck sessions are produced. There's a second, rarer exit at the step-limit fallback (agent.go:487-494, finalSummary) with the same gap.

Neither exit currently checks whether the session ever reached a terminal state — the turn just ends, and agent_sessions.status is left wherever it was (usually active, its creation-time default, store.go:71,84).

Design

Two different failure shapes need two different fixes — collapsing them into one heuristic would either auto-close genuinely in-progress structured tasks or fail to catch the trivial-Q&A majority.

1. Trivial/no-lifecycle-tool sessions (the 43/50 case) — auto-complete inline, same turn. If a turn ends with a plain-text response (len(msg.ToolCalls) == 0, the existing exit at agent.go:359) AND this session has never called set_goal in its history, that's strong evidence this was never meant to be a structured multi-step task — it's a one-shot question that got answered. Call store.completeTask server-side right there, before the return, with outcome="success" and a summary derived from the response text (first ~120 chars, same truncation pattern buildContinuationNote already uses at continue.go:203-205). No LLM call needed — this is a mechanical default, not a judgment call, matching the "trivial task" case SOUL.md already describes.

If the session has called set_goal (meaning the model explicitly framed this as a task, e.g. the fleet-health-check session), auto-completing on the very next plain-text turn is riskier — the model may reasonably expect to be asked something next. Skip the inline auto-complete for these; case 2 covers them.

2. Structured (goal/plan set) sessions that stall — idle sweep, not inline. Extend the existing runContinuationWorker ticker (continue.go:41-57, already polling every 4s for a different purpose) with a second, coarser sweep — e.g. every 5 minutes — that finds sessions where:

• status is active, planning, or executing (not already terminal or awaiting_input, which has its own resolution path), AND
• set_goal was called (this is a real task, not case 1), AND
• last_active_at is older than some idle threshold (start with 15 minutes — long enough that it's not still mid-turn, short enough that the board doesn't lie for hours).

First idle hit: inject a system note next time nothing else touches the session ("[System: this task has been idle for N minutes with no complete_task call. If the goal is done, call it now with a summary. If you're genuinely still working, ignore this.]") the same way buildContinuationNote already injects notes into resumed sessions — reuse resumeSession's live-persist pattern (continue.go:106-196) so the nudge and the model's response show up in the transcript, not silently.

If a second idle sweep finds the same session still not completed (i.e. the nudge didn't take), auto-complete it directly with outcome="partial" and a summary noting it was auto-closed after an unanswered nudge — same reasoning as resumeSession's existing "give the task a real, operator-visible terminal state instead of leaving it silently stuck forever" logic at continue.go:179-193, which already does exactly this for a different failure mode (a resume that produces no response). This is the same architectural pattern, applied to a session that produces responses but never a terminal tool call.

3. Leave ask_operator and gated-execution flows alone. Those already have real terminal signals (awaiting_input status, the continuation worker's assent-window logic) — this plan only targets sessions that fall through with no lifecycle signal at all.

Fix plan

1. Inline safety net (case 1) — in chatWith's plain-text exit (agent.go:359), check set_goal was never called for this session (cheap: track a bool while replaying history in the same function, no extra query — the loop at agent.go:209-226 already walks every persisted message and could flag sawSetGoal while extracting tool calls). If not sawSetGoal, call completeTask before returning.
2. Idle sweep (case 2) — new ticker in continue.go (or extend the existing one with a slower secondary tick), a new store query (store.staleGoalSessions(ctx, idleThreshold) mirroring pendingContinuations's shape), and reuse of resumeSession's live-persist injection for the nudge.
3. Second-strike auto-close (case 2, continued) — track nudge count (a new agent_sessions column, e.g. completion_nudges int default 0, or reuse the existing summary/attributes json instead of a schema change if that's preferable) so the sweep can tell "never nudged" from "nudged once already, still stuck."
4. Backfill — the 50 already-stuck live sessions won't get fixed by new code alone (they're historical). One-time cleanup: run the same case-1/case-2 classification against existing rows once the code ships, so the board doesn't show 50 permanently-orphaned "Running" cards on top of new correctly-terminating ones. This should be a script, not a manual UPDATE — the classification logic will already exist in Go.

Implementation order

1. Fix 1 (inline safety net) first — it's the highest-leverage, lowest-risk change (self-contained, no schema change, covers 43/50 of the evidence).
2. Fix 2+3 (idle sweep + second-strike) — needs the schema decision (new column vs. attribute) settled first; smaller blast radius than 1 but touches the ticker/worker machinery, deserves its own review pass.
3. Fix 4 (backfill) last, once 1-3 are deployed and verified live — running it before the code ships would just recreate the same gap for new sessions created in between.

Verification

• After fix 1: start a few trivial one-shot chats against the live agent (hostname-style questions), confirm each session reaches status=done immediately after the answer, via curl localhost:8092/sessions/:id or the task board.
• After fix 2+3: manually let a goal-bearing session go idle past the threshold (or lower the threshold for a local test run), confirm the nudge appears in the transcript, then confirm second-strike auto-close fires if the nudge is ignored.
• Re-run the same audit query used to find this bug (curl localhost:8092/sessions → status histogram) a day after deploy; the "stuck active/planning forever" count should track only genuinely in-flight tasks, not accumulate.

Open questions

• Outcome for case-1 auto-complete: always "success", or worth a cheap heuristic (e.g. scan the final text for obvious failure language)? Recommend starting with always-"success" — SOUL.md's own trivial-task guidance doesn't distinguish, and a wrong "success" on a genuinely-failed one-shot lookup is low-stakes (the transcript still shows the real answer; nothing acts on the outcome besides the board's color).
• Idle threshold (15 min) and nudge-to-close gap: arbitrary starting points, not measured against real task durations — worth revisiting after a week of the new sessions' real timing data exists.
• Schema change for nudge tracking: a new column is simpler to query than packing state into existing JSON, but adds a migration — worth confirming that's acceptable before starting fix 2+3 (this plan defers that call to whoever implements it, per Implementation order above).