job-babysitting

name	job-babysitting
description	Directly monitor long-running jobs or pipelines, classify them as healthy, waiting, stalled, failed, completed, or unknown, and choose the next action. Use when the active agent needs to babysit training runs, batch jobs, services, experiments, or scheduled work over time.

Job Babysitting

Treat Babysitting As State Classification

• Babysitting means maintaining an evidence-backed view of whether work is progressing and intervening only when the evidence supports it.
• Compose this skill with scheduler, experiment, or domain skills. Use those skills for platform-specific commands and this skill for monitoring logic.
• Reuse the project's existing monitoring signals before inventing a new dashboard or parser.
• The active agent owns the monitoring loop end to end. Do not hand the work to a separate service, timer, watcher, or one-off agent.

Run The Monitoring Loop Directly

1. Define the requested terminal or decision condition.
2. Define progress signals and their expected cadence before polling.
3. Inspect scheduler or process state, then verify logs and expected artifacts.
4. Classify the state and take only the proportionate next action.
5. Report the evidence, wait for the next meaningful cadence, and repeat.

• Continue until the terminal condition is met, the user stops monitoring, or a genuine blocker requires new authority or information.
• Use native scheduler, process, log, and filesystem tools from the current session. Do not install or invoke a separate monitoring subsystem.
• Keep healthy polls cheap. Read only new log output and changed artifacts instead of repeatedly rescanning complete run trees.
• Preserve interventions and decision-changing results in the run README or routed lab notebook, not in a parallel monitoring ledger.
• Do not spawn a persistent monitoring subagent unless the user explicitly requests delegated ownership.

Use This Output Contract

When using this skill, report:

1. State: healthy, waiting, stalled, failed, completed, or unknown.
2. Evidence: the strongest signals supporting that state.
3. Last progress point: timestamp, counter, checkpoint, or artifact.
4. Blocker or failure cause: if known.
5. Next action: wait, recheck, inspect, cancel, restart, resubmit, or escalate.

Define Progress First

• Identify what counts as real progress for the job, such as queue state changes, fresh log lines, checkpoints, metrics, output files, heartbeats, or completed subtasks.
• Identify the expected cadence from healthy prior runs, sibling jobs, or the launcher's documented behavior.
• Do not call a job stalled until you know what normal progress looks like.

Gather Evidence In Layers

• Check orchestration state, such as scheduler, process, or service status.
• Check progress artifacts, such as log freshness, step counters, metrics, checkpoints, or output directories.
• If outputs exist, inspect one representative artifact or plot when visual corruption or qualitative failure is part of the success criterion.
• Check failure signals, such as tracebacks, repeated retries, OOMs, timeouts, dead heartbeats, or frozen timestamps.
• Check external blockers, such as dependency waits, missing inputs, storage issues, or exhausted resources.

Apply These Rules

• Do not label a job stalled without at least two stale or frozen signals when a second signal is available.
• Do not relaunch a failed job before deciding whether the failure was scheduler-only or a real runtime defect.
• Do not declare success until the expected output artifacts exist.
• Do not mistake process existence, GPU allocation, or RUNNING state for proof of health.

Classify The Current State

• healthy: evidence of forward progress exists at the expected cadence.
• waiting: blocked by scheduler, dependency, quota, reservation, or another external gate, without evidence of code failure.
• stalled: the job is nominally active but progress signals stopped beyond a reasonable threshold.
• failed: the job reached a terminal state or logs show a real runtime error.
• completed: the job ended and expected outputs exist.
• unknown: evidence is incomplete or contradictory.

Act Proportionally

• For healthy, keep monitoring and report the strongest progress evidence.
• For waiting, report the blocker and the earliest meaningful recheck.
• For stalled, verify with at least two independent stale signals before cancelling or restarting when possible.
• For failed, inspect the root cause before relaunching. If the failure is real, fix or escalate instead of blindly retrying.
• For completed, verify the expected artifacts before declaring success.
• For completed, inspect a representative visual artifact as well when a job can finish while still producing qualitatively bad output.
• For unknown, run the fastest check that can reclassify the state.

Report Like An Operator

• Include exact evidence paths, timestamps, counters, and job or run IDs.
• Distinguish "no recent evidence of progress" from "confirmed failure".
• Make the next action explicit: wait, recheck, inspect logs, cancel, restart, resubmit, or escalate.
• When handing off, say what you checked and what would trigger the next intervention.

References

• Read references/health-signals.md for monitoring cues, stall heuristics, and next-action patterns.