terminal-status guard + source stamp for orphan-respawn (662

Overview / Motivation

Auto-filed by /daily 2026-07-09 from an orchestrator observation during the nightly problem sweep.

Goal

Stop the two-week orphan-respawn loop posting [autonomous_session_watch:orphan-respawn] markers + git commits against TERMINAL tasks #662 (archived), #663 (completed), #867 (completed), and make the orphan-respawn pass structurally unable to act on a terminal task.

Workflow gap

• Bug observed: Tasks #662/#663/#867 have accumulated 709/709/393 epm:progress orphan-respawn markers ("active task (status=running) had no live registered session ... auto-respawned via spawn-issue --auto") since 2026-06-26 / 07-03, each committed to main (~1,800+ junk commits, ~91/task/day), while all three tasks have been terminal for 1-2 weeks (#663 completed 06-25, #662 archived, #867 completed 07-02).
• Why it is a workflow gap: The canonical cron watcher is exonerated — its per-pass logs (logs/autonomous_session_watch/2026-07-09.log) show orphan-sweep: 2 active-status task(s) and contain ZERO mentions of #662/#663/#867 or any "auto-respawned" line, and task.py list-by-status --status running returns only #1092. The posted marker notes ALSO lack the "(attempt N/M today)" suffix that current _post_progress_marker code appends — so the poster is a STALE BUILD of autonomous_session_watch.py running somewhere outside the canonical cron (irregular timestamps, e.g. 02:22/02:33/03:08/03:10/03:18Z, not aligned to the 3-59/10 cron), reading a stale task-state snapshot yet committing markers into the canonical tree. ~/explore-persona-space-codex-port was checked and ruled out (no tasks/662 there). No respawned sessions actually materialize (today's 76 transcripts are all legitimate wave/#1092 sessions), so the damage is marker/commit spam + registry churn, not pod spend — but the loop is unbounded and pollutes events.jsonl + git history.

Proposed change (refine in planning)

1. Defense in depth (primary): in _process_orphan_task (and _respawn_orphan), immediately before the respawn action and before posting the orphan-respawn marker, RE-VERIFY the task's live status via task.py view <N> --json against the canonical repo root; if the status is terminal/parked (completed, archived, awaiting_promotion, on_hold, blocked), abort with a loud log line and post nothing. A stale _active_status_tasks snapshot must never produce a respawn or a marker on a terminal task.
2. Self-identification: stamp host + pid + git rev-parse --short HEAD of the running checkout into the orphan-respawn (and stalled-respawn) marker note, so any future stale-instance occurrence identifies its source on the first marker.
3. Forensic hunt: locate and kill the stale poster (grep running processes/timers/other-user crontabs/other machines with push access; the marker cadence is ~1/task/10-20min). Document the finding.

Scope / surfaces

• Primary target: scripts/autonomous_session_watch.py
• Secondary: .claude/rules/background-automation.md (document the terminal-status re-verify + stamp)

Constraints / invariants

• Workflow-surface only. scripts/workflow_lint.py --check-asks passes; ruff on touched files passes.
• This session runs under EPM_WORKFLOW_FIX_SESSION=1 semantics (workflow_fix_target Provenance line) — it MUST NOT auto-route its own subagents' workflow-fix candidates.

Provenance

• fingerprint: 35aca6cbb5a1

• workflow_fix_target: scripts/autonomous_session_watch.py

Evidence trail: tasks/archived/662/events.jsonl (709 orphan-respawn rows, first 2026-06-26T10:28:46Z, last 2026-07-10T03:18:02Z); tasks/completed/663/events.jsonl (709 rows); tasks/completed/867/events.jsonl (393 rows); commit bb784d7d39 (a representative marker commit); canonical watcher log logs/autonomous_session_watch/2026-07-09.log (zero #662 mentions, "orphan-sweep: 2 active-status task(s)").