The sticky-block gate added in the previous commit classifies a task from
the `created` event payload that upstream `create_task` writes. That
producer is code we do not own, so trusting it silently was the gap: if
upstream renamed the key, dropped it, or stopped deriving it from
`initial_status`, the image would still build and ship a consumer that
mis-classifies every task it reads.
Anchor the producer contract at build time, before the regression suite
runs, with three assert-only preconditions: the `initial_status="blocked"`
park resolves `task_status` to `"blocked"`, every non-park creation
resolves it to something else, and the `created` event carries that same
variable under `"status"`. None of them rewrite the producer.
Textual anchors cannot see dataflow, so add the runtime net the reviewer
asked for. The suite now drives the real API: create + claim an ordinary
task, trip the circuit breaker once at failure_limit=1 so it parks with a
`gave_up` event (leaving its own `created` event as the most recent
create/block/unblock row), then recompute at failure_limit=2 and require
promotion to ready. That case is red under an unconditional-true created
predicate and red under producer drift that labels every created event
blocked, while the explicit block/unblock, dependency-promotion and
circuit-breaker-at-current-limit cases stay green. Non-blocked and
malformed created payloads are pinned as controls, and the gate now
rejects non-dict payloads rather than trusting `.get`.
Also make the live placement correction durable: titan-04 is cordoned
after repeated kernel undervoltage and kubelet failure and titan-19 was
probe/Longhorn unstable under worker load, so both join the hard NotIn
list; titan-05 is healthy but sits at 3592m/3600m requested CPU, so the
main hermes container gives back 50m (350m -> 300m) to schedule there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three narrowly scoped Hermes reliability fixes backed by live evidence
from the Cassandra/titan-iac proof run.
Worker concurrency. Three simultaneous direct CLI workers on the 4-core
hermes-agent node drove load to ~45 and made the hermes and oauth2-proxy
containers fail their probes, leaving the pod 8/10 Ready; two workers
stayed at 10/10. Cap HERMES_CLI_LANE_CONCURRENCY at 2 and lower the
cli-lane-runner CPU limit from 3 to 2 so the dashboard and auth sidecars
keep a guaranteed share of the node. Requests are unchanged: the pod
still asks for 745m total, so placement does not move.
Service links. Kubernetes injects a service-link variable pair for every
service in the namespace, and hermes-claude-broker produces
HERMES_CLAUDE_BROKER_PORT=tcp://10.43.31.76:9006 — a value the broker
parses as an int. That contaminated worker and test environments even
though the deployment already addresses every service by DNS name. Set
enableServiceLinks: false on the hermes-agent pod spec.
Blocked-task scheduling. create_task(initial_status="blocked") records a
created event carrying status=blocked but never a blocked event, while
_has_sticky_block() only inspects blocked/unblocked events. recompute_ready()
considers blocked tasks, so an explicitly parked task with no incomplete
parent auto-promoted on the next dispatcher cycle. Teach _has_sticky_block()
to also recognize a created event whose payload status is blocked, which
covers tasks created before this image patch without adding a persisted
field. Dependency-driven promotion and the circuit-breaker failure-limit
guard are untouched; unblock_task() still releases either kind of block.
hermes-kanban-blocked-regression.py runs against the real upstream
kanban_db API during the image build, so the build fails if any of these
semantics regress.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
