skills/worker-orchestration-aar-2026-01-13.md

Worker Orchestration AAR (2026-01-13)

Goal

Parallelize three bd issues using worker spawn and background worker agents.

Scope

• Issues: talu-gsga, talu-jid5, talu-w8oq
• Base branch: main
• Worker model: sonnet-4.5

Environment

• Repo: /home/dan/proj/talu
• Network: restricted sandbox (fetch requires escalation)
• Tools: worker, bd, git

What Happened

1. Ran worker spawn using positional args; command failed due to CLI syntax.
2. Retried with -t and -d flags; worker attempted git fetch and failed due to network restriction.
3. Retried with -f main; fetch still attempted and failed.
4. Partial worktrees and branches were created without worker registry entries.
5. Manually removed worktrees and deleted branches.
6. Re-ran worker spawn with network escalation; workers created successfully.
7. review-gate was not found, so review integration was disabled.
8. Rendered worker prompts and launched background workers.

What Went Well

• After network access, worker spawn created worktrees/branches reliably.
• Prompt rendering and background worker launch were straightforward.

Pain Points

• worker spawn always attempts git fetch, even when --fromBranch is local.
• Default base branch is origin/integration, which is not present in this repo.
• Spawn failures left behind branches and worktrees without worker registry state.
• Missing review-gate produces warnings without guidance on setup.
• Network access requirements are easy to miss during first-time use.

Impact

• Time lost to retries and cleanup before workers could start.
• Non-obvious failure modes and manual recovery steps.

Observed Errors

• spawn does not expect non-option arguments at "talu-gsga"
• fatal: not a valid object name: 'origin/integration'
• ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.108 port 2222: failure
• WARN: enableReview: failed for <id>: review-gate not found

Recommendations

1. Allow worker spawn to skip git fetch when the base branch is local.
2. Make the default base branch configurable or auto-detect a local main branch.
3. Roll back branch/worktree on spawn failure to avoid manual cleanup.
4. Improve error messaging to distinguish network vs branch-not-found.
5. Provide setup guidance when review-gate is missing.

Questions for Worker Team

• Can worker spawn be configured to avoid network fetches?
• Is there a way to set a global default base branch (e.g., main)?