Status

Status

A status snapshot is trustworthy exactly when every line traces to an artifact that exists on disk right now; the first inferred line turns the report into a guess wearing a report's clothes.

Report only observable local facts: available intent, subject-manifest, and verdict artifacts; their counts, digests, and timestamps; deterministic check results; and unavailable or corrupt sources. The canonical durable stores are .agents/ao/intents/sha256 and .agents/ao/verdicts/sha256; subject manifests remain caller-supplied unless the caller names their location. When .agents/ao evidence exists, report which stored artifact kind is newest and label that conclusion as evidence recency, not runtime phase or process activity.

Always disclose checked and not_checked. Runtime phase, execution elapsed time, tool-call activity, and remaining work are not_checked unless a caller provides a separate authoritative source for them.

ao status is the evidence-store view. It validates content-addressed artifact names and content before counting them, reports corrupt and unavailable entries, and shows only intent/verdict counts plus evidence recency. Legacy session indexes, provenance summaries, flywheel health, and quality signals belong to their own read surfaces and are not aggregated into this command.

Status does not inspect work queues, assign priority, claim work, infer a next action, repair records, govern retries, or change any state. Optional Git or tracker metadata may be displayed only when the caller supplies it; absence cannot change the report interpretation.

Named failure mode — recency-as-activity: reading "newest artifact is a verdict" as "validation is running", which invents a runtime phase from a timestamp.

Anti-pattern: filling not_checked gaps with plausible narrative so the snapshot feels complete. Corrective: report the gap as a gap; an honest hole outranks a smooth story.

Return the snapshot and stop.