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orca/docs/reference
Jinwoo Hong 79be5b7fde feat(orchestration): report a worker blocked on a human prompt (STA-4513, STA-3714) (#15261)
* feat(orchestration): report a worker blocked on a human prompt (STA-4513, STA-3714)

A lane parked on an approval, trust, or permission prompt looked exactly like a
lane that was thinking or inside a long tool call. On origin/main, driving a real
cursor-agent through Orca:

  surface                        running `sleep 60`   awaiting approval
  worktree ps agents[].state     working              working
  terminal show / list           no such field        no such field
  terminal wait --for tui-idle   satisfied: true      satisfied: true
  worker-show                    no agent state       no agent state

The runtime already fuses hook state, OSC title, and matched prompt text into a
`permission` verdict inside getTerminalAgentStatus — it was reachable only from the
renderer, and it was blind to cursor-agent approvals. Two gaps, one boundary.

Exposure: getTerminalInteractiveWait publishes that same fusion, minus the async
foreground probe, as `agentWait` on `terminal show` and on `worker-show`'s
observation. It carries the evidence that proved the wait (hook, prompt-text, or
title) so a coordinator can weigh it. Null means no proof; a missing field means
the host predates it — absence is never read as "not waiting".

Detection: cursor-agent's hook set has no approval event and beforeShellExecution
fires identically for auto-allowed commands, so its rendered menu is the only
authority. Matched on the key-bound choices rather than the prose, requiring two,
and self-clearing when the follow-up input line returns. Its live spinner title is
exempted from the staleness rule that clears startup modals, because cursor keeps
spinning while it waits.

Falls out of routing it through the shared verdict: `dispatch --inject` into a
cursor pane on an approval now refuses with agent_prompt_blocked instead of typing
the preamble into the dialog.

Fixtures are captured verbatim from cursor-agent 2026.08.11-e8db854 driven through
Orca; the same case matrix was replayed live against a built runtime.

terminal list stays untouched: its rows would each need a full tail scan, and
STA-4694 owns the one-call-per-run aggregate.

* fix(orchestration): only call a Cursor approval live while it owns the screen

Independent review found the approval detector trusted one dismissal string, so
any later output that did not contain cursor's follow-up line left the menu
reading as a live wait. Reproduced: a tail of the real menu followed by two lines
of ordinary output returned agent-approval-prompt, which fails tui-idle and
refuses prompt injection on a healthy lane.

Replaced with the structural property the string was standing in for: a live
dialog owns the bottom of the screen, so the last choice may sit at most one line
above the end of the retained tail. That tolerates a status footer or a partial
line mid-redraw without admitting scrollback, and it drops the vendor prose.

Being bottom-of-screen is also the dating this reason needed, so it no longer
requires waitBlockedAt. A tail restored from terminal history carries none, and a
lane parked on a prompt emits no bytes — so before this, an Orca restart made
exactly the lane both issues are about go quiet for good. The startup modals keep
the timestamp rule: their text lingers in scrollback with nothing to say whether
it was answered.

Also from review:
- worker-show and federationShow reuse the verdict showTerminal already computed
  rather than rescanning the tail, so the two can no longer disagree.
- The worker-show test now drives a real runtime, real PTY tail, and the real
  detector; it previously mocked getTerminalInteractiveWait, so it would have
  passed with detection permanently returning null.
- The guard claim is now asserted against the guard: a blocked pane rejects both
  assertTerminalAgentSendable and sendTerminalAgentPrompt, and a working pane
  still passes.
- Added a non-local (connectionId) pane case, since the verdict is derived from
  retained tail and title state on every host.

* fix(agent-status): stop a hook wait from outliving its agent

A third reviewer caught that the hook branch proved agent ownership from the pane
title alone, while the shared verdict it claimed to reuse also probes the
foreground process. A shell that takes a pane back usually sets something like
`user@host: ~/repo`, which no title rule recognizes, and a hook row stays fresh
for AGENT_STATUS_STALE_AFTER_MS — so a dead agent could be reported as waiting on
a human for half an hour.

Hook evidence now goes through getTerminalAgentStatus, which is the only thing
that can answer whether an agent still owns this PTY. The two prompt branches skip
it: a matched prompt is on the pane's screen now, so it proves itself. That makes
the probe cost fall exactly where correctness needs it, and getTerminalInteractiveWait
async, which only showTerminal had to absorb.

Also trims the comments the same reviewer flagged as longer than the repo's rule.

* test(agent-status): pin that a dead pane stops reporting a human wait

A fourth reviewer noted the approval menu sits at the bottom of a dead pane's tail
forever, and that no test covered process exit with no trailing output. The
snapshot already refuses an exited pane, and worker-show gates agentWait on proven
identity — this pins both so neither can drift into reporting a worker that needs
intervention as one that needs an answer.

* fix(orchestration): never report an unchecked worker as not waiting

Automated review caught that the three worker paths which return before the wait
is ever evaluated — unattached, missing, and identity_changed — then had their
undefined coerced to null by the emitters. A worker whose process was replaced was
reported as `agentWait: null`, which reads as "Orca looked and nobody is waiting"
when Orca never looked. That is the false negative this field exists to remove.

The field is now emitted only when it was evaluated, so a present null is a claim
about the pane and an absent one means nobody looked — because the host predates
the field, or the worker's identity could not be verified. The CLI and the
worker-show note say that rather than blaming an old host.

Covered on the context-only path, where the regression test fails against the
previous behavior; the supervised and federated emitters take the identical
one-line change.

Also trims the two test-file headers to one statement of purpose.

* fix(agent-status): tighten the Cursor menu match and stop guessing on unknowns

Fourth review round, three findings, each reproduced before acting.

Matching each choice marker with an independent lastIndexOf let text outside the
menu carry the anchor. An agent narrating "next time I'll suggest Run Everything"
after the menu was answered pulled the match down to the bottom of the screen and
revived it. The match is now confined to the last lines of the tail, and a choice
is a line that ends in the key that picks it — prose writes the same words but not
the same shape.

The one line of slack under the dialog went with it. It was a guess; every capture
of a live dialog ends on its last choice, and one line is exactly enough room for
that narration. A redraw caught mid-flight now reads as no wait until the next
poll, which is the safe way to be wrong.

The hook branch awaited a foreground probe that reaches a PTY controller which may
be a remote host, so a wedged probe stalled every caller of showTerminal — a path
that never probed before. It is bounded now, and a timeout leaves the wait
unevaluated rather than claiming there is none.

Which is the same distinction the previous commit only fixed one level up:
getTerminalInteractiveWait itself turned an unreadable pane into `null`, so
showTerminal published "looked, nobody waiting" for a pane it could not read. It
returns undefined there, showTerminal omits the key, and worker-show's text output
prints unknown rather than rendering it the same as none.

* fix(agent-status): bound the wedged probe's cost and stop matching prose keys

Fifth review round. No correctness defects in the shipped behaviour this time; two
robustness holes and the documentation of the contract.

The bounded probe abandoned the wait but not the request, so a coordinator watching
a wedged remote host added one live probe on every poll. It is single-flighted per
PTY now, the way the leaf-absence probe already is.

The trailing-key rule that separates a menu row from the agent narrating a choice
was written as a character class, and any lowercase run up to twelve characters
satisfied it — "…suggest Run Everything (as before)" passed. Spelled out as key
names instead, which also lets the glyph forms of those keys through.

The contract wording said an absent agentWait meant an old host or an unverifiable
identity. It also covers an unreadable pane and a probe that did not answer, and a
reader diagnosing an old peer from that would be wrong. Corrected on the type, the
worker-show note, and in docs/reference/remote-wire-compatibility.md, which had no
entry for a field whose absent and null states mean different things.

Also strengthens the worker-show agreement test, which compared the terminal and
observation payloads without asserting either held the expected wait, so it passed
when both were absent.
2026-08-18 14:19:20 -07:00
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