Fifteen review findings on the fast-path rewrite plus one caught live, all
verified against a real 1.18.1 server before landing:
- sendwait picks a fresh seq (the epoch second) instead of a fixed 2, so a
second prompt to the same worker is typed instead of silently swallowed as
an already-applied duplicate; explicit seq remains for deliberate resends
- sendwait self-heals stranded delivery: an Ink repaint occasionally eats the
Enter (observed live), so a timed-out short first wait sends one bare \r and
re-waits by resending the identical frame as a tagged duplicate
- spawn_worker verifies the resolved casePath carries Codeman hooks (the same
/api/hook-event marker the server checks), refusing names that resolve to
linked or pre-existing hook-less directories instead of running the job in
what may be the user's real repo
- spawn_worker probes the trust dialog after a short 5s composer wait, not the
full 45s, restoring the ladder staging verbs.md documents; on a readiness
miss it deletes the half-spawned session and returns 1 with empty stdout,
so a prompt can never be typed blind into a trust dialog
- spawn_workers refuses duplicate case names and empty argument lists, and
keys result files by index
- section 1 is bash 3.2 compatible (indexed arrays, no declare -A), prints the
full delivered/timedOut/signal tuple per worker with an explicit line for a
missing result, deletes only workers whose turn really ended (a timeout
means still working), cleans up spawned siblings when any spawn fails, and
guards its mktemp
- last_text takes the previous answer as an optional second argument for
consecutive-turn reads (the transcript briefly serves the prior answer
after a stop, observed live)
- the stale duplicate bullets in section 1's closing list are gone
- reference/verbs.md joins the mode-list drift guard's file list
- README's skill inventory covers verbs.md and the new SKILL.md shape
- the changeset is minor so the shipped release matches the 1.19.0 stamp
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Measured against a live 1.18.1 server, the API does the whole job in about ten
seconds: two cold claude workers spawned and ready in 6.3s, both tasked and both
answers read in 4.0s more. The slowness users reported was agent-side.
Three causes, all of them things the skill taught:
- It taught serial spawning. Nothing in the main document showed `&`/`wait`, so
"spawn two workers" read as "do the readiness ladder twice", which is one model
turn per worker.
- It had no spawn primitive. The happy path had to be reassembled on every run from
where-to-spawn, a four-stage readiness ladder, send-and-wait, the fan-out caveats
and a recipe with two variants. Each is a decision, and most carry a warning.
- It cost ~16k tokens before the first call, at 3.6:1 prose to code, with 25 warning
glyphs and 55 occurrences of "never". A document that is mostly failure modes
teaches caution, and caution bills as thinking tokens.
The preamble now defines the verbs rather than describing them: spawn_worker,
spawn_workers (concurrent), sendwait, last_text. Section 1 composes them into the
whole job in one Bash call and says to stop reading there.
Two ceremonies the measurements retired: the pid poll (one iteration, 33ms, and
wait-output already blocks on the composer) and reading settings.local.json to check
hooks for a case quick-start creates, which always has them. That check stays
required for linked cases and raw paths, where its absence silently breaks
send-and-wait.
The bootstrap's write condition now greps the version stamp, so a stale or truncated
preamble self-heals rather than failing and asking for a manual rm. The stamp line is
kept bare because the grep anchors on it with $; an inline comment there would rewrite
the file on every bootstrap.
Section 5 moved to reference/verbs.md behind an index, cutting the always-paid
SKILL.md from ~16.4k to ~7.6k tokens. Section numbers and anchor slugs are unchanged,
so existing references still resolve; all 201 anchors across the five files were
checked, with the checker positive-controlled against an injected bad link.
Verified by extracting the code blocks from the shipped file and running them against
the live server: bootstrap plus full fast path, two workers resolving on the
definitive stop signal, answers read and sessions deleted, in 6.8s.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Codeman maintainer