judgement

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 task
• mac 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.