* Shorten orchestration skill description under the Agent Skills 1024-char limit
The folded description was 1038 chars, so spec-conforming installers such
as SkillStar rejected the bundled orchestration skill. Drop the two clauses
already covered elsewhere in the same description: "decomposing work across
agents" (implied by "structured multi-agent coordination") and "automation
of the browser embedded inside Orca" (restated by the locked `orca-cli`
embedded-pages sentence). Every routing trigger asserted by
orchestration-skill-guidance.test.mjs, the orca-cli handoff boundary, and
the Computer Use boundary are unchanged. Result: 958 chars.
Add config/scripts/skill-description-length.test.mjs, which parses every
skills/*/SKILL.md frontmatter with `yaml` and fails on an empty or >1024
char description, so the regression cannot return. orca-cli sits at 1015
and is left as is.
Fixes#17935
* Keep the embedded browser in the orchestration description's orca-cli routing
Restores the word "browser" in the orca-cli sentence ("and the Orca embedded
browser") so agents scanning for it still route embedded-browser control to
orca-cli. Description is 985 chars, 39 under the spec limit.
* Fix orchestration CLI recovery, settled-Dispatch mail, and guide defects
Five reported orchestration CLI defects, verified individually before fixing.
Two were real code defects, one was a docs error, one was correct as-is, and
one was correct on both ends except for its recovery wording.
- Mail addressed to a settled `dispatch:<id>` was accepted and silently dropped.
Local sends bypassed the settlement check the federated branch already had, so
the caller was told success for a delivery no worker would ever read. Reject
with `dispatch_inactive` and name the Run mailbox to use instead.
- A lost mutation response offered no read-only way to ask whether it took
effect. `--retry-request` does dedupe correctly, but the recovery guidance
emitted a query command only when the payload carried a dispatch id, which is
exactly what a lost response lacks. Add read-only
`orca orchestration request-show --request <id>` over the durable receipt
ledger, and always emit a read-only step before the keyed retry.
- The bundled `orca-cli` guide documented `check --unread --inject`, a flag the
parser rejects. Correct it to `--format` and add a ratchet that runs every
orchestration invocation in the bundled guides through the real CLI parser.
- `check --json` is one stdout document and its keepalives are stderr-only; the
reported `Extra data: line 2` came from merging the streams. Document the
contract rather than changing the wire.
- A rejected lifecycle message is loud on both ends already, but the rejection
never named the flag that supplies the missing capability. Name it.
* Harden orchestration mutation recovery guidance
* feat(orchestration): surface nested worker depth and propagate it across hosts
Builds on the depth enforcement in the previous commit, which shipped with the
setting reachable only by editing settings.json and with workers never told they
could nest.
Adds the Settings -> Agents control (a 1/2/3 select rather than a free-form
number, which bounds the value without inventing a numeric input primitive). The
key stays absent from the SettingsUpdate RPC schema, matching agentSkillSharingEnabled:
settings.update is reachable from the CLI, so an RPC-writable depth would let a
worker raise its own cap.
Adds a SUB-DISPATCH block to the dispatch preamble, emitted only when the worker
actually has budget left. A worker told it "usually cannot" delegate still tries and
then reports the refusal as a blocker, so the section is omitted entirely rather
than softened.
Propagates depth to federated worker hosts. Previously the home side computed and
stored a depth the remote host never received, so a remote attachment always read
as depth 1. That is correct at the default cap and wrong as soon as the cap is
raised — precisely when someone starts relying on nesting. The field is optional,
so an older Run home simply omits it and the attachment's NOT NULL DEFAULT 1 keeps
the fail-closed behaviour. Enforcement still runs on the executing host against
that host's own cap, consistent with the SSH execution boundary.
* fix(orchestration): close nested depth readiness gaps
* fix(settings): defer nested depth translations
* fix(orchestration): drop federated depth keys that main already landed
The enforcement PR's review pass added the same federated depth propagation
before it merged, so replaying this branch onto main produced duplicate object
keys. Keep main's versions -- its schema entry validates an integer >= 1 rather
than any finite number.
* fix(settings): label nested worker depth select
* fix(settings): move nested depth to orchestration
* fix(settings): refine nested depth placement
* fix(orchestration): enforce nested worker depth instead of an accidental fence
Orca documented that "dispatched workers cannot spawn their own sub-workers
(worker-start is coordinator-fenced)". No such check existed. What existed was a
single Run-binding check in the workerStart RPC: a worker's terminal is not bound
to a Run, so worker-start happened to fail. The rule was emergent, asserted by no
test, and written in no doc — and it leaked. A worker could run-create its own
Run, task-create, and worker-start: now bound, the check passed.
Replace it with a real, configurable depth cap.
Depth is derived from the caller's own active Dispatch rather than from Run
binding, which is what dissolves the run-create bypass: creating a Run does not
stop you being a worker. Enforcement lives in a single dispatch-row writer that
owns all three INSERTs that mint a live worker — the generic claim, the supervised
worker-start path (including every retry), and the remote attachment. Two of those
were missed by earlier drafts of this change, so `creator` and `maxDepth` are
required parameters: a new spawn path cannot compile without deciding, and a
boundary test refuses the SQL anywhere else.
Schema v30 adds depth to dispatch_contexts and remote_dispatch_attachments,
NOT NULL DEFAULT 1 and backfilled to 1 so an unstamped or pre-upgrade row fails
closed rather than reading as a root coordinator. The attachment pane indexes
widen to the five states in which a remote worker may still be running:
loss of contact is not evidence of process death, so an unverifiable worker still
counts as a nesting parent.
Also adds the caller-evidence assertion that workerStart was the only Run-scoped
verb to skip, so a declared --from cannot name another terminal's pane and inherit
its depth.
Default is 1, so behaviour is unchanged unless the new setting is raised. Two
limitations are deliberate and documented rather than papered over: this is a
guardrail and not a security boundary, since a caller whose launch evidence is
unverifiable (any ordinary restored terminal) can declare another handle; and it
is enforced at supervised dispatch creation, so a settled worker whose process is
still alive counts as a root again.
* fix(orchestration): share caller resolution and pin worker gaps
* refactor(orchestration): make the caller resolver's pane contract explicit
Overloads so requireStablePane callers get a non-null string instead of casting,
and rename the attestation opt-out to say what it means: the caller asserts it
itself. A flag called assertEvidence:false reads as "attestation optional",
which is the hole this helper exists to close.
* fix(orchestration): propagate dispatch depth to federated workers
* chore(cli): refresh bundled orchestration guide
* perf(runtime): gate terminal.list visual layouts and stop the false writable claim
visualLayouts is ~31% of a large terminal.list payload (44,208 B of 137,412 B on a live 134-terminal remote runtime) and has exactly one consumer: the human-readable CLI formatter. Gate it behind an includeVisualLayouts request param that defaults to included, so pre-flag clients are unaffected, and have every --json/internal caller opt out.
Also drop the record-backed builder's writable, which was a verbatim copy of connected. terminal.show now states writability explicitly as exactly what terminal.send's PTY gate enforces.
* test(runtime): type the payload-size fixture arrays for tsc
* fix(runtime): preserve terminal list compatibility
* test(runtime): guard terminal list optimization
* fix(cli): preserve agent access to terminal layouts
* Add version-matched bundled skill guides
* Clarify skill freshness rollout PRs
* Add canonical skills show alias
* fix(skills): address guide review feedback
* fix(skills): make guide commands cross-platform
* fix(skills): apply the ORCA convention to the emulator guides
Review follow-up: the emulator guides still instructed literal
`orca emulator ...` in sh fences with no Linux disambiguation, so on
unmanaged Linux they could launch the GNOME screen reader — the exact
failure the executable-selection preamble prevents. Both emulator
guides now carry the preamble and ORCA placeholder across fences,
tables, and prose, and the cross-platform safety test covers all four
converted guides. Also replaces computer-use's "unless a block names a
shell" carve-out, which contradicted its own POSIX example, with the
unconditional placeholder rule.
Jinwoo Hong
Brennan Benson
OrcaWin
Jinjing