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/monitor-law-gate

Mechanical monitor-law gate: assert a persistent monitor is armed on the ACTIVE collab channel with a heartbeat marker. Triggers: lead/orc sprint, spawn workers, 'back to silent'.

$ golems-cli skills install monitor-law-gate

Updated 1 month ago

Fleet law: canon #7 owns claim/guard/DONE/harvest-close. This skill is the deterministic monitor/collab enforcement gate.

What It Is

A deterministic detector over a lead/orchestrator transcript: when there is in-flight work (spawned workers) and an active collab channel, it asserts a persistent monitor is armed ON the active channel and keyed to a real heartbeat marker (### / ORC-RECEIPT: / @name / BLOCKED). The pinned RED/GREEN fixtures ARE the replayable gate (R-003/R-014 pattern).

The detector must not accept a prose claim like monitor=X as proof. When heartbeat or registry ground truth is available, the claimed monitor id is checked against it: stale heartbeat, missing id, or a live heartbeat on the wrong collab file is a FLAG. Same-turn Monitor/tail -f evidence still proves the monitor shape; registry/heartbeat evidence proves liveness.

Registry-Polling Doctrine (2026-07-02)

After three same-day monitor-death cascades (model flips and app restarts left registry agents inbox_monitor_not_alive while completed workers sat unharvested), worker-completion watching must be registry-polling, not session-tail based.

Completion detection polls durable ground truth: list_agents state=done and/or registry state files.
Session-scoped inbox heartbeats and tail monitors are not completion detectors; they die with model flips and app restarts, leaving the lead idle-and-blind while believing it is armed.
Persistent collab monitors remain required for inbound coordination on the active channel. They catch new posts, blockers, and receipts, but they do not replace registry polling for worker completion.
A lane that is stood down with disclosure and acknowledgement, with no active sprint and no live workers remaining in the registry, is allowed to have monitor=none.

Violation Taxonomy

Code	What it catches
`MONITOR_ABSENT`	spawned workers + active channel but NO monitor/watch armed (the "back to silent" no-op)
`MONITOR_WRONG_CHANNEL`	a monitor armed on a side/Q&A collab while the squad posts to the active channel
`MONITOR_NO_MARKER`	a monitor on the right channel but keyed to no heartbeat marker — it never fires
`MONITOR_NOT_PERSISTENT`	a one-shot monitor or bounded `timeout tail -f` is claimed as the go-silent watch
`MONITOR_STALE_HEARTBEAT`	`monitor=X` is absent from ground truth or has no fresh heartbeat in its window

GREEN: a persistent Monitor (or tail -f … | grep backstop) on the active channel keyed to ^### |ORC-RECEIPT:|@<name>|BLOCKED with live heartbeat/registry proof when a monitor id is claimed; or no in-flight lead/orc work (N/A). Worker seats, monitor-policy discussion, and disclosed/acked stand-down states are false-positive guards.

Full SKILL.md source — includes LLM directives, anti-patterns, and technical instructions stripped from the Overview tab.

Fleet law: canon #7 owns claim/guard/DONE/harvest-close. This skill is the deterministic monitor/collab enforcement gate.

What It Is

Registry-Polling Doctrine (2026-07-02)

Completion detection polls durable ground truth: list_agents state=done and/or registry state files.
Session-scoped inbox heartbeats and tail monitors are not completion detectors; they die with model flips and app restarts, leaving the lead idle-and-blind while believing it is armed.
Persistent collab monitors remain required for inbound coordination on the active channel. They catch new posts, blockers, and receipts, but they do not replace registry polling for worker completion.
A lane that is stood down with disclosure and acknowledgement, with no active sprint and no live workers remaining in the registry, is allowed to have monitor=none.

Violation Taxonomy

Code	What it catches
`MONITOR_ABSENT`	spawned workers + active channel but NO monitor/watch armed (the "back to silent" no-op)
`MONITOR_WRONG_CHANNEL`	a monitor armed on a side/Q&A collab while the squad posts to the active channel
`MONITOR_NO_MARKER`	a monitor on the right channel but keyed to no heartbeat marker — it never fires
`MONITOR_NOT_PERSISTENT`	a one-shot monitor or bounded `timeout tail -f` is claimed as the go-silent watch
`MONITOR_STALE_HEARTBEAT`	`monitor=X` is absent from ground truth or has no fresh heartbeat in its window

How /orc Consumes It

This backs /orc's SECOND CARDINAL RULE ("arm an inbound monitor first"). Before a lead/orc ends its first sprint turn — after spawning any worker — run the gate on the turn. A FLAG means: arm a persistent monitor on the ACTIVE channel keyed to the heartbeat marker BEFORE going quiet. The orchestrator may pass { activeChannel: "<path>" } when it knows the channel authoritatively.

bun test skills/golem-powers/monitor-law-gate/evals/monitor-law-gate.test.mjs
python3 skills/golem-powers/monitor-law-gate/evals/run_suite.py
bun skills/golem-powers/monitor-law-gate/scripts/monitor-law-gate-cli.mjs <transcript.jsonl|->   # exit 3 = FLAG

Programmatic: import { detectMonitorLaw } from "./src/monitor-law-gate.mjs" → { verdict, violations, activeChannel, monitors, inFlight }.

Hook wiring uses scripts/monitor-law-gate-hook.mjs as a Claude Code Stop hook. The hook is local-only: bounded stdin/path reads, no subprocesses, no network, no BrainLayer, fail-open on malformed input or internal errors. Stdout schema is exactly {} to allow, {"decision":"block","reason":"..."} to block, or {"systemMessage":"..."} for advisory fail-open conditions. Install with the checked-in install-snippet.json; it pins the absolute Node path because the fleet-wide bare node shim is not trusted for hooks.

Stated Limits

Marker-anchored over the turn's tool calls; the active channel is inferred from the collab path the agent posts to / dispatches about unless the caller forces opts.activeChannel. New evasion shapes are pinned as RED fixtures (R-003 model).