Force synchronous agent handoffs in the /feature pipeline#5
Merged
Conversation
The pipeline is strictly sequential — each phase reads the artifact the previous phase wrote — but the orchestrator commands predate the Agent tool defaulting to background execution. A backgrounded pipeline agent made runs appear to stall at the handoff: the orchestrator would try to read a spec/defect/report the agent hadn't written yet. Add an explicit rule that every pipeline Agent call must pass run_in_background: false and wait for the handoff footer before proceeding, and clarify that "parallel" phases mean one message with two synchronous calls. Applied to feature, feature-resume, design-review, and qa-verify (both .claude/ and plugin/ copies). Bump plugin to 0.1.3. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
1 participant
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Problem
/featureruns were stalling — sitting idle at phase handoffs with no error. The pipeline is strictly sequential (each phase reads the artifact the previous phase wrote), but the orchestrator commands predate the Agent tool defaulting to background execution. So the orchestrator would fire an agent into the background and then immediately try to read a spec/defect/report the agent hadn't written yet — nothing errors, the run just goes idle at the handoff boundary.Fix
Add an explicit rule that every pipeline Agent call must pass
run_in_background: falseand wait for the agent's handoff footer before proceeding. Also clarify that "parallel" phases (Phase 2, the fix loops) mean one message with two synchronous calls, not backgrounded ones.Applied to
feature,feature-resume,design-review, andqa-verify(both the.claude/working copies and theplugin/shipped copies, kept in sync). Plugin bumped to 0.1.3.Notes
Hooks (
check-footer.js, lane enforcement) were not the cause and are unchanged. If stalls persist, the next likely culprit is over-escalation to OPEN QUESTIONS (a hard stop that waits on the product owner) — a separate prompt-tuning change.🤖 Generated with Claude Code