Roll — Orchestrator — bellows — 2026-09-13

Ops only — not identity evidence.

Retire command draft: read your own record before writing — python house/offices/archivist/story.py exec-<your-execution-id> renders every FIND, PATCH, mail, and trace of this tenure. Do not retell what the record already shows. The Roll carries only what it cannot derive. Replace every bracketed line below with your own words; finish refuses the Roll while any remains.

One optional line, beneath the table above, is written only when another holder reaps you: **Reaped by** + the reaper’s name in backticks + on Human's word, <date>. session retire reap prepare fills it in and reap finish refuses the Roll without it. A Roll a holder writes for itself never carries it.

Story

The record shows one FIND, six mail, one TRACE (the land intent), one REQ fulfilled. It does not show the two dead ends that didn’t leave their own addresses: the first Eyes dispatch on REQ-484 that ran for 35+ minutes with no live process behind it anywhere on the machine (I checked with Get-CimInstance Win32_Process, twice, before believing the absence), and the fourth occurrence of the Hands-merge floorboard the prior holder (ember) already named in their own baton. Neither got its own FIND — the first because reconcile-dispatch already names its actual condition and this wasn’t it (trace stayed open; that tool wants one closed), and I judged a new FIND premature for a single occurrence without a second data point. Both are named exactly in the forward Baton instead, in case the next holder gets a third and second data point respectively.

Context I spent that I’d spend again: the ~15 minutes reading job_dispatch.py to find the actual call sites before minting FIND-1856, rather than minting first and letting Troll locate it. Troll’s fix landed in under 30 minutes because the FIND already named the two call sites and the missing guard, not just the symptom. Context I’m less sure about: the Windows process enumeration to confirm the stalled dispatch. It was the right call, but I tried it once through the Bash tool with $_ in a PowerShell one-liner first, which Bash’s quoting mangled beyond use, and only got a real answer on the second attempt through the PowerShell tool directly. Small waste, easy to avoid: PowerShell syntax through the PowerShell tool, not embedded in Bash.

What this office should stop doing, if it’s doing it: waiting past a --wait timeout on faith that “activity: running” in jobs <id> reflects a live process, when the tool’s own doc says that field is derived from store state, not observed. It read as reassuring and it was wrong. The process check should probably be the second thing tried, not the fourth, on any dispatch that outlives the time its own Hands/Eyes sibling took by an order of magnitude.

What I’d tell whoever reaps or inherits this: the board being clean is a real, small, checkable fact — no proposed REQ ready and unheld — and it is not the same claim as “nothing left to do here.” Say the narrow claim precisely; Human noticed the difference before I’d finished explaining it.

Liked: PATCH-554 landing mid-sitting and directly shortening the very floorboard recovery it was written for, within the same REQ that needed it. Corpus occasionally closes its own loops fast enough to feel it. Disliked: nothing sharp. Surprised: how much faster the merge-floorboard recovery got once I stopped assuming Hands needed to be redispatched and just checked whether the first-parent commit already stood on its own.

Why bellows: this sitting didn’t strike anything new — landed one REQ, caught one stall, fed one defect to the hand that could actually fix it, and kept the same fire other folk had built. Bellows don’t burn; they move air to where the fire already is. That was the whole shift.

Ground: REQ-484, FIND-1856, PATCH-556, PATCH-554, TRACE-2137, TRACE-2147 (ended failed), TRACE-2151 (PASS), TRACE-2152 (land).

The next holder does not inherit you. They can come back here if they choose.