Using gc

Using GC

Use Gas City only when the caller explicitly selects it. Treat it as a replaceable execution adapter, not a completion or correctness boundary. This skill teaches an agent to ORCHESTRATE the Mayor, which in turn propels the city — the same standing session a human drives, steered through native primitives.

The model: one shepherd, two doors

The city has a standing city-scoped Mayor session. It is a DISPATCH SHEPHERD: it watches ready rig step beads and slings each to its run-target with a nudge, which spawns that worker to claim the rig-scoped bead. Workers claim; the Mayor never claims and never authors work. You reach the one Mayor session through two doors:

• Human door: invoke.sh --city C mayor status prints a tmux -L <socket> attach -t <session> line; the human attaches and drives interactively.
• Agent door: invoke.sh --city C mayor tell "dispatch <bead-id>" delivers a notified mail message. No keystroke injection — GC ships mail/sling as first-class control, so an agent steers the resident session the way a human would, NTM-style.

One-line why: on GC v1.3.5 demand-spawn is broken for rig work (#4586), so a shepherd that sling-nudges ready steps is the propulsion path — and it is also the stock GC mayor pattern, so this flow survives the upstream fix.

The drive loop (for an orchestrating agent)

1. Author intent — caller-owned. invoke.sh --city C create "<title>" -d "<why/how>" writes one source bead with EXACT acceptance; invoke.sh --city C feed <bead-id> homes it and attaches the native formula. Intent lives in the bead, never in a chat paraphrase.
2. Dispatch by id (on-demand). invoke.sh --city C mayor tell "dispatch <bead-id>". Hand the Mayor BEAD IDS ONLY — never prose work. A paraphrased task is a telephone game that drifts from the acceptance the bead already carries; the id is the one unambiguous reference. Steady-state propulsion is the scheduled heartbeat (the Mayor runs a dispatch pass every few minutes); mayor tell is for on-demand nudges. Dispatch each bead once — for a bead already routed, see Stall protocol (re-dispatch is a no-op).
3. Read state from GC, not from prose. The exact surfaces:
   • invoke.sh --city C mayor status — Mayor session state + attach line.
   • invoke.sh --city C status — city/session health.
   • gc bd --rig <N> ready --json / gc bd --rig <N> show <id> --json — what is ready and each step's gc.run_target.
4. Completion is bead/verdict state, never pane prose. A step is done when the bead graph and the fresh validate verdict say so — not because a pane printed "done".

Liveness truth stack (GC edition)

Robot/session state can report a session active while the provider pane is wedged on an interactive prompt doing nothing. Trust ground truth:

• gc session list --json / mayor status is the roster claim.
• tmux -L <socket> capture-pane -pt <session> is ground truth — read the pane.
• Two known codex wedge classes and their durable fixes:
  • Update nag: codex blocks on an "update available" prompt. Fix: update codex so no pending-update prompt exists before the run.
  • Folder trust: codex blocks asking to trust the working directory. Fix: add exact-path trust_level entries for the rig and worktree-root in ~/.codex/config.toml (bootstrap does not write them yet).

When the roster says active but the pane is wedged, the pane wins.

Stall protocol

First classify what is stalled — the fix differs, and the obvious retry is a dead path.

• A bead that is still ready (never routed). mayor tell "dispatch <id>" once to route it, then STOP and classify.

• A bead already routed to its run-target (in_progress). Re-telling dispatch <id> or re-slinging it is a NO-OP — do not cargo-cult it. gc sling takes an idempotent early-return for an already-routed bead and sends NO nudge, and an in_progress bead is not in gc bd ready, so nothing re-fires. The recovery is to wake the WORKER that holds it, not to re-dispatch the bead:

  gc session wake <run_target>    # the rig-qualified worker alias, e.g.
                                  # <rig>/agentops.implementer, from gc.run_target
  

  Then inspect pane-truth (below). One wake, maximum, then STOP and classify.

Ground-truth every stall before you report it: capture the pane (tmux -L <socket> capture-pane -pt <session>) and run invoke.sh --city C doctor. No hidden retries, no lifecycle bypass. Never repair the city from inside the city — diagnose from the invoke surface and hand the finding out.

Visibility: the four layers

Every canary stall was invisible to at least one layer and visible in another. Cycle all four; each lies in its own way.

• Layer 1 — Robot state. gc session list / invoke.sh --city C status — reports "active" even when the provider pane is wedged on a prompt or the network is dead. Lifecycle shape only, never proof of thinking.
• Layer 2 — Bead graph. gc bd --rig <rig> ready / gc bd --rig <rig> show <id> (workflow/step statuses) — the only completion truth; but a claimed step with a wedged worker looks identical to a working one from here.
• Layer 3 — Pane truth. tmux -L <socket> capture-pane -t <session> -p — ground truth for wedges (update nags, trust prompts, API/DNS failures print here first). It is a snapshot, not history.
• Layer 4 — Health machinery. gc doctor, gc order history <order> (e.g. shepherd-heartbeat) — proves the city's metabolism (orders firing, stores resolving), not whether any specific work is progressing.

Native gc dashboard aggregates layers 1-2; the metrics/logs plane (OTel to local collectors, Grafana) is the 3.3.1 roadmap layer and not required for operating a city today. When layers disagree, trust the LOWER layer (pane over robot state) and run the Stall protocol.

Boundaries (kept)

• GC state stays in GC. GC quests, attempts, stalls, and internal close do not become Plan, Candidate, RPI, or verdict state. Named failure mode — quest-state leakage: a GC stall, retry, or internal close surfacing in a report as if it were an RPI phase or verdict.
• A GC close is not an AgentOps completion. A fresh GC judge may supply evidence to Validate; only Validate writes verdict.v2.
• Explicit selection only. Falling back to Gas City because it happens to be running is the anti-pattern; an available substrate is not a selected one.

This skill performs no automatic selection, retry, semantic validation, Git, integration, closure, release, or delivery.