| name | judgement |
| description | Hub-owned checklist for judging task-lifecycle gate quality and intervening on process defects. Read by the hourly judgement process and by any operator inspecting why the hub stopped a task, held an agent, or redeployed the fleet. |
Judgement
This skill is the hub's process-quality checklist. The hourly judgement
process (src/mac/judgement.py) reads it and acts. It does not run in a
sandbox. It has the current mac checkout and the same privileged verbs an
operator has: stop a task, hold an agent, stop the fleet, redeploy an image,
and start the appropriate entities back up.
It judges the quality of the gates on the claim/fix/deliver cycle, the
number of those gates, and the states tasks have wound up in. It does
not re-review the content of a task. Hub-verify (deterministic contract tests)
is the only default review gate. There is no LLM semantic reviewer.
Checklist
Each item is a finding kind the process emits. If the evidence matches, it
intervenes.
1. review_rejection_loop
Work already passed its tests and was pushed, then a reviewer rejected it,
then the next attempt did the same thing.
Observed 2026-08-23 on task_3b44296d (docs audit): four passing, pushed
attempts; a fleet reviewer and the hub-verify reviewer rejected each one;
17 million tokens; no publication. Same shape on task_ae2fc223
(route-ladder ADR): two hub-verify rejections after a passing push, then a
contract-gate failure that blocked two other P0 release tasks.
Intervene: stop the looping task. If the assignee is still burning
tokens on the same evidence, hold that agent. Do not assign another
semantic reviewer — that gate is gone.
2. high_token_without_publication
A task has spent a quarter-million tokens or more and produced no
publication. The ledger already raises high_token_work_without_publication.
Intervene: stop the task. If the owner is still in-flight on it, hold
the owner until an operator or a later judgement cycle releases them.
3. failed_dependency_deadlock
A task is blocked on a dependency that is failed (or otherwise terminal
and unsuccessful) under all_success. The child can never dispatch. Two P0
release blockers (task_529caba5, task_6086c172) sat in this state behind
task_ae2fc223.
Intervene: stop the blocked child so it stops looking live. Do not
reopen the failed parent automatically — that is how a broken ADR gets
re-implemented. Record the pair and leave the parent for an operator or a
code-level process fix.
4. stuck_reviewing
A task has been in needs_review or reviewing longer than the stuck
threshold (default two hours) without a publication. Twenty-two tasks were
in reviewing on 2026-08-23, including a P0 titled "Diagnose why the hub
self-tick fails to drain the 66 REVIEWING tasks".
Intervene: if hub-verify can still run, leave it for the next review
sweep. If it is waiting on an LLM reviewer, stop the task. If a
non-virtual agent holds the review, hold that agent.
5. semantic_reviewer_still_assigned
A pending review is assigned to a fleet agent (not the virtual
hub-reviewer). That is the gate this skill exists to keep gone.
Intervene: stop the task under review. If many such assignments are
live, stop the fleet, redeploy the current mac image, and start only the
hub-reviewer plus the workers that were not part of the defect.
6. excessive_reviewing_population
More than a tenth of non-terminal tasks, or more than twenty tasks, sit in
needs_review / reviewing. That is a process pile-up, not a busy day.
Intervene: stop the oldest stuck reviews first. If the pile-up persists
across a cycle, hold the worker fleet so new work stops feeding the queue,
then redeploy.
7. too_many_gates
A single attempt collected three or more distinct review or contract
rejections after already presenting passing executor evidence. The
claim/fix/deliver cycle has grown a gate that does not earn its keep.
Intervene: stop the task. Treat the extra gate as a process defect —
the same class of defect that made the semantic reviewer worth removing.
8. orphaned_pull_request
An open PR names a task that is already completed or cancelled, or
the same task id already has a merged PR. Observed 2026-08-23: 56 open
PRs against main, zero review decisions. Several were copies of work
that later landed under another number (#585 after #577, #587
after #580, #582/#612 after #614).
Intervene: close the orphaned PR. Do not open a replacement. The
branch is archaeology, not a second review queue.
9. duplicate_pull_request
Two or more open PRs name the same task. The deploy-generation
retirement record was opened five times (#485, #609–#613). Task
stop/restart was opened three times (#514, #641, #642).
Intervene: close every older duplicate. Keep the newest. Do not
ask another agent to re-implement the same change.
10. unlanded_pull_request
A PR is still open, the task is failed / blocked / reviewing,
and nothing with that task id has merged. This is the good work that
got stuck in semantic review and never landed — #643 (docs audit),
#634 (route-ladder ADR), and dozens more.
Intervene: stop the looping task. Do not close the PR. The
branch is the salvage. Hub-verify is the only gate left; a later
operator or judgement cycle can land it. Closing it is how the work
disappears a second time.
Authority
The process may:
mac task stop any live taskmac agent hold / mac agent resume any non-virtual agent- pause every registered project (fleet stop) and activate them again
- invoke the fleet redeploy command against the current mac checkout
- start stopped tasks and resume agents it held, after a redeploy
It may not invent a new review gate. It may not restore the semantic
reviewer. Every action is audited as judgement.* observability with the
finding kind that licensed it.
Bounds
A runaway judge is worse than a silent one.
- At most
MAC_JUDGEMENT_MAX_ACTIONS_PER_CYCLE interventions per hour
(default 20).
- At most
MAC_JUDGEMENT_MAX_REDEPLOYS_PER_DAY redeploys (default 2).
- Holds it places are tagged
judgement: so a later cycle can resume
only what it held, not an operator hold.
- Redeploy is injected in tests and fail-closed if the command is missing.
