Executive Summary

The orchestrator service started today at 20:52 UTC. Server activity was dominated by GitHub sync overhead — 76% of log lines (622/818) were gh_push operations, most of them redundant re-pushes of already-synced tasks. No new agent tasks were routed or run today (besides this retrospective task #20). The scheduled jobs tick ran at 21:00 UTC, creating task #20 and running the test-bash-job (which failed with exit=1 because its dir points to a deleted temp directory).

1. Tasks Completed Today

No tasks were completed today. The server started fresh at 20:52 and all pre-existing tasks were already in terminal states from prior days.

Current Task Inventory (20 tasks)

2. What Failed / Needed Retries

Today's Failures

• test-bash-job (bash job): exit=1 — the job's dir points to a deleted temp directory (/var/folders/.../tmp.ALBxJiKaXt). This will fail every hour until fixed.

Historical High-Retry Tasks (from prior days)

Root causes cluster into 3 categories:

1. GitHub DNS/network failures (2026-02-16 to 17) — api.github.com unreachable from codex sandbox
2. Codex auth/billing errors (2026-02-17) — forced fallback to claude mid-attempt
3. Invalid YAML/JSON agent responses (2026-02-16 23:00-00:00) — systematic, not per-task

3. Agent Prompt Effectiveness

prompts/system.md

• Good: Clear output schema, specific examples of good vs bad summaries, explicit safety rules
• Issues:
  • Duplicate instructions: "NEVER commit to main" appears twice (lines 6 and 13)
  • "NEVER work in main project directory" appears three times
  • Missing guidance on what to do when there's no test suite
  • Doesn't mention gh issue comment as the tool for posting issue comments
  • done → in_review override (by orchestrator) is not documented

prompts/agent.md

• Good: Clean template structure, all context in one place
• Issues:
  • Empty section headers render when values are blank (first attempt noise)
  • GIT_DIFF label says "current changes" but only shows --stat (file names)
  • AGENT_PROFILE_JSON injected as raw JSON without usage instructions

prompts/route.md

• Good: Concise, focused on single JSON output
• Issues:
  • profile.tools silently overridden by config — router's tool recommendations discarded
  • No guidance that selected_skills: [] is acceptable (triggers false warning)
  • Complexity guide doesn't mention it controls model tier selection
  • Labels contain routing metadata (agent:, role:, complexity:*) that router should ignore

prompts/review.md

• Good: Tight scope, clear decision criteria
• Issues:
  • Doesn't disclose that reject closes the PR (significant side effect)
  • Diff truncation (500 lines) not disclosed to reviewer
  • No preference guidance for request_changes vs reject ambiguity

4. Routing Accuracy

Key issue: Documentation tasks routed to codex. The route.md description of codex as "best for coding" is correct but claude has equal code capabilities — docs should prefer claude.

Task title/body truncation bug: Tasks #16 and #17 have titles "Add" with single-word bodies. Labels contain word fragments from the original text. Parsing bug in task creation.

5. Performance Bottlenecks

Critical: gh_push Redundant Sync Loop

622 out of 818 log lines today (76%) were gh_push operations.

Root cause chain:

1. 5 tasks are done but gh_state=open (GitHub issues not closed)
2. Task #19 has gh_state=OPEN (uppercase) — case-sensitivity bug
3. The dirty-count check counts done + !closed as dirty
4. When any task is dirty, the loop iterates ALL 20 tasks
5. Even "clean" tasks get logged and call sync_project_status (3 API calls each)
6. Per-task field extraction uses 30+ individual yq calls per task

Impact: ~600 unnecessary API calls per hour, ~60 unnecessary yq invocations per tick, potential GitHub rate limiting.

Secondary: Per-Task yq Overhead

Lines 242-271 of gh_push.sh read 30 fields with individual yq calls per task. For 20 tasks = 600 yq invocations per run. A single yq -o=json per task would reduce this to 20 calls.

Secondary: test-bash-job Failing Every Hour

The test-bash-job dir is /var/folders/.../tmp.ALBxJiKaXt (deleted). Fails with exit=1 every hour, creating noise.

6. Improvement Recommendations (Priority Ordered)

P0 — Fix today

1. Fix gh_push redundant sync loop — Skip done+synced tasks entirely. Don't count done+open as dirty if updated_at==gh_synced_at. Add case-insensitive gh_state comparison.
2. Fix or disable test-bash-job — Point at valid directory or disable.

P1 — This week

3. Batch yq field reads in gh_push — Single yq -o=json extraction per task.
4. Suppress empty sections in agent.md — Don't render headers for blank variables.
5. Clarify route.md complexity guide — Note that complexity controls model tier.
6. Add reject=closes-PR warning to review.md — Disclose side effect to reviewers.

P2 — Nice to have

7. Deduplicate system.md instructions — Merge repeated rules.
8. Route docs tasks to claude by default — Add routing hint.
9. Investigate task title truncation — Find and fix the bug for tasks #16-17.
10. Add content-hash dedup for project board sync — Skip sync_project_status when status hasn't changed since last sync.

Metrics

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