continuity-loop

/continuity-loop — The Unattended Renewal Spine

This skill owns the renewal contract behind the live multi-agent substrate the repo CLAUDE.md declares: NTM panes + MCP Agent Mail + renewal ticks. It does not run agents and it does not schedule anything — it defines what a tick is, what every supervised lane must do per tick, how a stall is detected, and when a stall becomes an escalation. Loop skills compose it; they do not reimplement it.

Use when: a loop skill needs a continuity step, a lane looks dead and you need a verdict (suspect / stalled / converged), or you are deciding whether to nudge, relaunch, or escalate.

⚠️ Critical Constraints

• This skill is a contract, not a scheduler — because AgentOps 3.0 ships no daemon. Tick firing is owned by host timing (cron, systemd user timer, or the operator tending loop); a substrate that owns its own clock drifts from the hookless doctrine.
• .agents/continuity/state.json is the only continuity state surface, because two state surfaces guarantee a split-brain stall verdict; every consumer reads and renews the same file.
• Two ticks before any stall verdict — because a single tick cannot distinguish a slow tool call from a wedge. One missed renewal marks a lane SUSPECT, never STALLED; acting on one tick produces nudge-storms that kill healthy lanes.
• Escalation is a message, never a silent kill, because the tender and the operator must see the same evidence trail; a killed pane with no Agent Mail record is indistinguishable from a crash.
• Never route continuity through rpi or bd — retired legacy — to prevent reviving a SPOF the substrate already paid to remove: the in-session ao-rpi loop is retired as the live workflow and bd/Dolt was retired 2026-06-11 (see Retired legacy).
• Healthy lanes are left alone, because interruptions reset agent context — a lane renewing on cadence gets no nudge, no message, no restart; the intervention IS the failure mode when the lane was fine.

What a renewal tick is

A renewal tick is one bounded observation pass over the supervised lanes: read each lane's pane activity (NTM robot state) and Agent Mail traffic, decide per lane whether forward progress happened since the last tick, and renew that lane's entry in the state surface. A tick observes and records; intervention is a separate decision the tick's output feeds.

Forward progress evidence (any one suffices):

Signal	Source
New pane output delta since last tick	NTM pane/robot state
New Agent Mail message or reservation activity	am inbox / reservations
Lane self-renewed its state.json entry	the state surface
Work-product delta (commit, closed item, new artifact)	git / tracker / .agents/

Tick cadence and the renewal contract

• Default cadence: one tick per 10 minutes of unattended operation; tighten for short-lived swarms, loosen for overnight runs. Cadence lives in the host timer, and is recorded in state.json so consumers can compute staleness.
• Renewal contract: every supervised lane gets its last_renewal and tick_seq advanced each tick — either self-renewed by the lane or renewed by the tender on observed evidence. An entry whose tick_seq is behind the global tick counter by one is SUSPECT; behind by two or more is STALLED.
• A lane that finishes cleanly is marked converged and leaves supervision; it is never reported as stalled.

Stall detection — the two-tick rule

1. Tick N: no forward-progress evidence → mark lane suspect. No action.
2. Tick N+1: still no evidence → mark lane stalled. Now intervene, in order: one nudge → if the next tick shows no recovery, relaunch the lane and route it through recover → if the relaunched lane stalls again on the same work item, escalate.
3. Any forward-progress evidence at any point resets the lane to active.

State surface

Path: .agents/continuity/state.json — single file, renewed in place per tick (write temp + rename).

{
  "schema": "continuity-state.v1",
  "tick_seq": 42,
  "cadence_minutes": 10,
  "last_tick": "2026-06-12T14:30:00Z",
  "lanes": [
    {
      "lane": "ntm:agentops:pane-3",
      "agent": "claude-worker-3",
      "work_item": "ag-xxxx",
      "status": "active",
      "tick_seq": 42,
      "last_renewal": "2026-06-12T14:30:00Z",
      "evidence": "am message 2026-06-12T14:28Z; pane delta +214 lines"
    }
  ]
}

status ∈ active | suspect | stalled | converged | escalated. Every status change cites its evidence string — a bare status flip is invalid.

How loop skills route their continuity step here

• evolve — its halt/handoff machinery (non-sticky HANDOFF, context exhaustion is not a stop) maps onto the tick contract: a handoff written this tick is forward-progress evidence, and the next tick expects the resumed lane to renew. Evolve consults state.json instead of inventing its own liveness probe.
• using-atm — the ATM tending loop is the reference tick executor: each tending pass over the panes is one renewal tick, and its nudge/relaunch/re-dispatch triggers are the intervention ladder this skill sequences. Pane-truth beats roster state when they disagree.
• recover — the re-entry adapter. A relaunched lane runs recover to rebuild context, then renews its state.json entry; that renewal closes the stall.

Escalation criteria

Escalate (Agent Mail message to the operator/tender lane + lane status escalated) when any of these hold:

• Two-tick stall that survived one nudge and one relaunch.
• The same work item stalls two different lanes (the work is poisoned, not the lane).
• Auth or rate-limit failure that account rotation did not clear.
• A file-reservation conflict on the lane's write surface (route to agent-mail coordination, not to a retry).
• A lane is re-doing work its own evidence trail shows complete (loop without progress — context saturation).

Retired legacy (explicitly NOT live)

• The in-session ao-rpi loop — retired as the live workflow. Its run directories are not a continuity surface; do not write renewal state there.
• bd/Dolt tracker liveness — retired 2026-06-11. Tracker reachability is not a lane-liveness signal and state.json never syncs into it.

Both are listed here only so nobody routes a continuity step back into them.

Output Specification

Format: JSON file (continuity-state.v1, shown above) renewed atomically each tick, plus an Agent Mail escalation message when a lane reaches escalated. Path: .agents/continuity/state.json, written to in place (temp + rename); escalations go to the operator/tender lane via am. Exit signal: a tick reports lanes: N active / N suspect / N stalled / N converged to the tender.

Quality Rubric

• No stall verdict was issued on a single missed tick (two-tick rule held)
• Every status change in state.json carries an evidence string
• Escalations exist as Agent Mail messages, not just status flips
• No continuity state was written outside .agents/continuity/state.json
• No live-path reference to rpi or bd anywhere in the continuity step

See Also

• using-atm — the reference tick executor (ATM tending loop)
• vibing-with-ntm — pane-level liveness truth and unsticking
• agent-mail — the message + reservation leg escalations ride on
• evolve, recover — loop consumers of this contract
• handoff — what a context-saturated lane writes before relaunch