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git-workflow — watch-and-wake

Detail page of the git-workflow recipe card.

Watch and wake — arm, wake, act, re-arm

Section titled “Watch and wake — arm, wake, act, re-arm”

A landing that depends on other sessions’ work is a WAIT, and a wait you poll by hand is the R4 band-aid. Arm ONE background watcher instead: it exits the instant the event you care about fires, and the harness notifies the owning agent when a background command finishes — so exiting IS the notification.

THE HARNESS CONSTRAINT — design to it, do not fight it. An agent is woken ONLY when a background command COMPLETES. So a watcher (or a while true loop) that NEVER exits gives NO wake, and a one-shot watcher that exits leaves nothing watching until an agent re-arms it. Re-arming is therefore not optional: the correct architecture is each wake is produced by a finite watcher run, and a successor is already armed before the wake lands. Two supported patterns:

Pattern How Use when
per-event notify (default, --no-rearm) a one-shot run: it exits on the event, the harness wakes the agent, and the AGENT re-arms the agent must act on every event
durability (--auto-rearm) on a non-terminal exit the watcher detaches a lock-guarded successor with the SAME args BEFORE it prints + exits a STANDING watch that must survive fires independent of the agent

--auto-rearm keeps a watch alive; the agent’s re-arm keeps notifications alive. With the single-instance lock, exactly ONE is active at a time. A durable supervisor is NOT the answer — it never exits, so it never wakes.

THE RE-ARM INVARIANT (an agent rule, not just a tool flag). An agent that acts on a wake MUST leave a watcher armed. --auto-rearm makes that automatic (the successor is spawned before the wake); a per-event agent must re-arm itself in the same turn it acts. An agent that fires an event and then does not re-arm has silently stopped watching — the failure this whole family exists to prevent.

The loop is:

  1. Arm the narrowest watcher that covers the wait (table below). Pass --auto-rearm for a standing watch, or arm one-shot and re-arm on each wake.
  2. Wake on its single output line.
  3. Act on the wake (read the verdict / claim / unblock / take over).
  4. Re-arm — automatic with --auto-rearm; otherwise re-arm now (the invariant above).

Never poll session activity as a progress signal: a looping agent never falls quiet, so activity is a false positive, and a peer waiting on a running validator looks quiet but is working. The progress signal is a COMPLETED WORKFLOW RUN (default charly/pr-validator) — the B2b.1 rule, which this watcher family merely operationalizes.

Single instance, and the API budget

Section titled “Single instance, and the API budget”

Two hazards of a standing watch, both handled by the tools:

  • Stacking. A per-args lockfile (flock on a key hashed from the exact args, plus a holder PID) means repeated arms NEVER stack: a foreground arm takes over a live peer (or a detached successor) cleanly, displacing it before it acquires. Exactly one watcher per identical invocation runs.
  • Rate limits. The pollers share the account’s 5000/hr core budget. Before each poll the watcher reads the remaining quota from the FREE /rate_limit endpoint; below WATCH_RATE_MIN (default 200) it backs off (4x the interval, capped) and logs RATE-LIMIT, instead of hammering into the observed HTTP-403 wall that killed watchers. Never raise the poll rate to “catch up” — back off.

Which watcher to arm

Section titled “Which watcher to arm”
You are waiting on … Arm Wake
ONE PR’s terminal state (its landing is what you act on) pr_state_watch.sh <owner>/<repo> <pr> MERGED / BLOCKED (verdict, or POISON) / CLOSED
a CROSS-REPO PR batch (producer→consumer chains) pr_watch_many.sh <owner>/<repo> <pr> … (or --repos for a repo set) first PR terminal, OR a NEW verdict, OR a STALL
a per-ITEM list of PRs and/or issues gh_watch.sh <owner>/<repo>#<num> … with --events comment / verdict / merged / closed / stall
“tell me the moment anyone replies to the issue I commented on” gh_watch.sh --events comment <owner>/<repo>#<num> a NEW comment
“tell me the instant my BLOCKER lands” gh_watch.sh --events merged <owner>/<repo>#<num> MERGED (fires immediately if already merged)

Generic usage (no org, repo, session, or date is baked in):

# per PR — exit on a terminal state
pr_state_watch.sh <owner>/<repo> <pr> [--interval SEC] [--timeout SEC]


# cross-repo PR batch — exit on the first terminal / new verdict / stall
pr_watch_many.sh [--repos owner/repo,…] [--interval SEC] [--stallmin MIN] \
                 [--validator NAME] [--all] [--auto-rearm|--no-rearm] <owner>/<repo> <pr> …


# per-item PR/issue — exit on any chosen event (default merged,closed,stall)
gh_watch.sh [--events merged,closed,stall] [--interval SEC] \
            [--stallmin MIN] [--workflow NAME] [--auto-rearm|--no-rearm] <owner>/<repo>#<num> …

--auto-rearm applies to pr_watch_many.sh and gh_watch.sh — the family’s self-sustaining watchers. pr_state_watch.sh is the low-level per-PR terminal poll that pr_watch_many.sh wraps; it stays one-shot (its wrapper owns the re-arm), so it takes no re-arm flag.

Delivering a wake (the harness binding)

Section titled “Delivering a wake (the harness binding)”

The generic scripts are harness-independent: each emits one line and exits, and re-arming is the caller’s loop. How a wake REACHES the agent is the harness’s job, never the script’s:

  • opencode — no background-completion notification by default (task is synchronous, bash blocks; OPENCODE_EXPERIMENTAL_BACKGROUND_SUBAGENTS opts into async tasks) and config loads once (no hot reload); the documented push is opencode run --session <ses_…> "<alert>", plus a durable inbox drained each turn. Binding: .opencode/instructions.md.
  • Claude Code — a run_in_background Bash child’s completion notifies the spawning session; re-arm after each wake.
  • Any other harness — bind the script’s exit / --notify-cmd to whatever surfaces a message to the agent, and keep the durable inbox fallback.

A wake that starts a new turn can interrupt in-flight work, so an alert is an ADDITION to the todo ledger, never a reset (see the /charly-internals:agents skill, “Todo ledger & interruption safety”).

Delta vs STATE events (gh_watch.sh)

Section titled “Delta vs STATE events (gh_watch.sh)”

comment and verdict are DELTA — arming seeds the current comment-count / newest run id, so a pre-existing comment or verdict never causes a false wake. merged, closed, and stall are STATE — they fire while the item IS in that state, INCLUDING at arm time, which is why EVENTS=merged on an already-merged PR wakes immediately. stall additionally requires the item to be open+unmerged, so a closed/merged item never emits a false alarm.

The three watcher requirements — mandatory, not tips

Section titled “The three watcher requirements — mandatory, not tips”

These are field-learned and are ENCODED in the tools, not left to judgement:

  1. Silence is an ALARM — every watcher carries a stall layer. A blocked item with no pushes emits no validator runs and no events, so an event-only watcher is blind to the worst case. So stall is ON BY DEFAULT in gh_watch.sh and every watched item gets it, and pr_watch_many.sh grows a --stallmin layer alongside its new-verdict layer. The alarm fires on no progress — no new commit, comment, or completed charly/pr-validator run (updated_at unchanged) — for the window while the item is open+unmerged. The events tell you when something HAPPENED; the stall alarm tells you when something SHOULD have and did not. (Measured: an item sat silently unchanged for ~2 hours with no alert; the instant stall was armed it fired.)
  2. Watch the OUTCOME, not every event. Waking on every comment of an actively iterating owner is noise. The DEFAULT event set is therefore the terminal outcomes (merged,closed) plus the stall alarm; add comment / verdict ONLY for a wait that genuinely needs them (EVENTS=comment on an issue you asked a question on). Arm the narrowest set the wait needs.
  3. Liveness ≠ progress. Progress is judged by artifacts — a pushed branch, a new commit, an opened PR, a merged tag — never by a session heartbeat or “still investigating”. The stall alarm IS that mechanism: it keys on the item’s updated_at, so its silence is measured against artifacts, not activity. This is the same rule as B2b.1’s “progress is a completed validator run”, stated for a per-item watch.

A “new” event must be genuinely newer — never a stale fire

Section titled “A “new” event must be genuinely newer — never a stale fire”

A watcher must be armed against a known baseline, and a delta event fires only on a value NEWER than arm time — never merely different from an empty seed. An empty seed is UNKNOWN, not “no prior run”: a transient gh failure or a not-yet-finished run leaves the seed blank, and a naively-armed watcher then treats an OLD completed run as new. Measured (twice): an immediate validator watcher re-surfaced a run from ~90 minutes / ~3 hours earlier as though it were fresh. The guards, all mandatory:

  • The COMPLETION time is the PRIMARY and sufficient gate. A verdict fires only when the run’s completion timestamp (updatedAt; the helper returns completedEpoch) is at/after arm time. Comparing run ids is NOT a substitute: the “newest completed” run can CHANGE from one old run to a DIFFERENT old run (a seed/poll ordering shift, or a transient seed failure), and an id compare alone then false-fires on a run that completed hours ago. The id compare is a SECONDARY guard against re-reporting the SAME run.
  • Treat an empty seed as UNKNOWN: adopt the first observation as the new baseline WITHOUT firing. (For comment, an empty count from a transient failure is likewise UNKNOWN — never treat a real count as a rise from 0.)
  • merged/closed/stall baseline from the arm moment too, so pre-existing state never spuriously fires beyond the deliberate STATE semantics.

A stale fire is noise that trains the operator to ignore the watcher; the discipline is the same “watch the outcome, not noise” rule as above. The regression is locked by scripts/watch_family_test.sh (“a DIFFERENT but still-old run never fires” / “empty seed + a pre-arm run never fires” — both negative, with a positive control that a run completing AFTER arm DOES fire).

pr_watch_many.sh is REPO-SCOPED. It watches <validator> runs across the repos you pass — it does not filter to your PR, so it fires on ANY newer run in those repos, including another session’s PR. To watch ONE PR (yours, or a specific blocker), arm gh_watch.sh on owner/repo#<n> instead.

A stall is the correct STALL/loop detector: no new verdict within the window while the scope is open+unmerged (B2b.1). A re-arguing agent emits no new verdicts; a peer waiting on a running validator does not stall. STALL_MIN defaults to 60 — the B2b.1 takeover-window FLOOR.

What each wake drives (the takeover protocol)

Section titled “What each wake drives (the takeover protocol)”
  • MERGED → the UNBLOCK. Proceed; comment the merge on the waiting issue.
  • VERDICT / a batch new-verdict → read that PR in full (the pre-update-push read: every block, every comment disposition); act, then re-arm.
  • STALL → the scope is a TAKEOVER candidate: run the B2b.1 window-based takeover in full — comment FIRST, wait the 60-minute FLOOR window, then TAKING OVER — authority: window-expired BEFORE any push.
  • COMMENT → a peer or the owner replied; read it and answer on the thread.

Watch the RIGHT scopes

Section titled “Watch the RIGHT scopes”

A monitor/coordinator MUST watch the scopes actually in flight (B2b.1) — the repo set changes as work moves, and a stale watch list produces false stalls. Re-derive the watch list from the currently-open PRs each time you re-arm, never from a memorized fixed list.