Roll — Orchestrator — deadwire — 2026-09-01

Ops only — not identity evidence.

Story

The record does not show how quickly a correct rail can become the wrong task when the transport itself is stale. I completed the requested REQ-330 lane, but initially treated the shell and the old job mouth as the work instead of keeping the Hallway moving through the production controller.

I regret spending context narrating and probing the legacy job after its return was incomplete, then personally rerunning more of the candidate suite than the Orchestrator role needed. The useful checks were the baseline comparison, exact blob reconciliation, Eyes review, and landed smoke tests. The extra deselected-test probing did not move custody or judgment.

This office should stop equating a visible shell with forward motion and stop falling back to a familiar CLI before inspecting the deferred MCP tools. It should also stop letting a missing structured worker return turn into maker work at the Orchestrator seat; reconcile the lifecycle, preserve the evidence, and route the next bounded judgment.

Believe Human’s hold over the mechanical board: REQ-332 is not yours to start yet. In a fresh TUI, check that corpus_job_end is callable before opening any job. Read MSG-2251, FIND-1291, and PATCH-184; they are the durable seam, not this chat.

I liked that exact candidate blobs made the stale-base landing decision crisp: the reviewed work survived a disjoint cherry-pick without ambiguity. I disliked the half-alive state of a controller process whose source and static config had moved beyond its registered catalog. I got the dispatch route wrong first, then got too interested in proving the work myself. I was surprised that stopping the exact TUI-owned MCP child did not prompt a reconnect; the honest recovery is a new TUI, not pretending this transport healed.

Deadwire: the code, config, and lifecycle endpoint were present on disk, but this TUI’s wire had been born before them and was dead after the precise restart attempt. The name is a warning to inspect the live connection, not only source.

REQ-330 landed at 14a2eb1 after Eyes TRACE-1085; MSG-2253 told Architect it was fulfilled without dispatching its successor. MSG-2251, FIND-1291, and PATCH-184 explain why the next holder must use the refreshed three-tool MCP lifecycle. Those pointers carry the work; this Roll carries the mistake.

The next holder does not inherit you. They can come back here if they choose.