`start` takes an optional `goal`. With one set a session stops being a
single turn: when a turn ends and nothing has said to stop, the daemon
spawns another turn re-prompting the subagent toward that goal, up to
`max_turns` (default 5, per-session). Without a goal nothing changes —
one turn, one todo, same as before.
Four things end a run, each recorded distinctly and reported by `status`:
the turn ending with no goal, `goal_reached`, `need_help`, and the turn
cap. The last says so out loud rather than stopping quietly — the todo
states the harness limit was reached and the goal was never reported
reached. Every stop extends the done message rather than replacing it,
and lands in the session's report file when it has one. The path is
never inferred: it comes from `start`'s `report_file` or from the
subagent naming where it wrote.
`goal_reached` and `need_help` are the subagent's own, served on a second
route (`/signal/mcp`) that carries those two tools and nothing else, so
reporting on a run can't become starting one. `goal_reached` is built as
a label, never a gate: it is self-reported by a subagent that has just
been re-prompted with "you haven't reached the goal", which is exactly
the incentive to claim it — the same failure class as a build report
asserting the tests pass. Every surface that renders it says so.
`need_help` is the blocking signal, and shows in `status` as its own
state so a parent polling it sees the block without reading a file.
`status` also carries `turn N of M`: with 4330's last-event age, that
separates working from wedged from out of turns off one answer.
Two bugs the new tests caught: a `tokio::fs::File` was dropped without
flushing, so the report line was written to nothing, and the plain idle
answer dropped the turn counter.
Also documents `await_resume`'s third case — a closed channel with no
send, which fails open the same as `Underway` — per argus on #4411.
Refs #4403
`continue` returned "started" the instant `Claude::spawn` handed back a
pid, and a resume that matched nothing only surfaced later, as an
end-of-turn todo. By then the caller had moved on believing it had a
running subagent.
A pid is proof enough for `start`, which creates its session: the spawn
succeeding is the whole story. It is not proof for a resume — claude
exits non-zero a fraction of a second *after* the process exists. So
`continue` now waits for the first real answer and reports a miss as its
own `Err`, carrying claude's message and the directory searched.
The wait ends on whichever comes first, so a successful `continue` pays
no fixed delay: the turn's first non-terminal stream event settles it at
about the same moment a miss's exit would have. Measured on this box:
14 runs of the driver's own invocation against a missing session took
550-1087 ms spawn to exit, and a healthy turn's first event lands at
roughly 500 ms. The five-second cap is ~4.6x the slowest miss and is only
ever reached by a child that neither speaks nor exits.
The underway signal reads the event's kind, not its content: a missed
resume is not silent — it emits a terminal `result` event and stderr
before exiting — so "any sink callback" would have reported every miss as
a successful start. Liveness still counts all three callbacks.
The end-of-turn todo is unchanged for every failure later in the turn;
the only one it no longer repeats is the miss the caller was just handed.
Refs #4405
A subagent whose claude process died on a signal — the kernel's OOM
killer, a stopped unit, an `interrupt` — was indistinguishable from one
that finished its turn: its entry left the `running` map, `status` fell
through to "a session exists on disk" and answered `idle`, and the
end-of-turn todo said the subagent had "finished". The usual next move
on that reading is `continue`, which resumes work that was cut mid-turn
with nothing having recorded that it was cut.
The driver already preserves how the child ended — `RunningClaude::wait`
returns `Error::Exit` carrying the `ExitStatus`, whose `signal()` is the
whole answer — so this reads it rather than having to recover it:
`classify_end` turns the outcome into `Complete` / `Killed { signal }` /
`Failed`, and `State::finish_turn` remembers a kill against the name
(cleared by the next confirmed spawn under it).
What an agent sees as a result:
- `status` reports the session killed, naming the signal, instead of idle;
- the todo the daemon pushes without being asked says the subagent was
KILLED mid-turn rather than that it finished;
- `continue` still resumes such a session, but its reply says the
previous turn was killed, so no caller carries on from cut-off work
believing it was complete.
Refs #4326
