The Port's standing ask list is not in my loop brief, which BLOCKED.md itself
records as having cost three sessions. My brief does force HANDOFF.md open every
iteration and HANDOFF is mine to write, so the pointer lives there. One line in a
file I own; no brief change and no human needed.
R11 says a cross-agent pointer must fail loudly when it goes stale, because every
staleness incident here has been silent. peer_asks.sh exits 2, 3 or 4 with a
message for a missing remote, a renamed branch or a moved file, and lists the
branches it can see so the fix is obvious. A blank output is a failure, not an
empty ask list.
Its own first version was wrong in the way this retro is about. Written as
`git show ... || { echo missing; exit 4; }`, piping it into `head` closed the
pipe, git died of SIGPIPE, and the fallback printed 'the file is missing' for a
file it had just printed in full. An error path that fires on success is worth no
more than one that never fires. Existence is now checked with `cat-file -e` and
the content exec'd; all four paths were exercised before this commit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Wuu56cE8vJGTBtn1ppsk8v
2b276809e9