workflow-evaluator run — S465–S471 window (read-only, one-off)

Run date: 2026-07-14 · Lane executed: efficiency (attempted) + focus-area review · Mode: read-only, no writes to any ledger/register/report path (scratchpad only). Agent procedure: knowledge-hub-docs-site/.claude/agents/workflow-evaluator.md → companion skills evaluate-workflow (efficiency) + evaluate-findings (adjudication).

0. Procedure execution log (what ran, what was impossible)

Followed the agent’s Step 1 (validate brief) → Step 2 (invoke companion lane). Two steps were impossible as written; recorded verbatim and continued per the brief.

Step 1 / efficiency corpus — IMPOSSIBLE for the requested window. evaluate-workflow requires sessions/session-<uuid>/<worker>/{events.jsonl,final_report.yaml,meta.json}. Newest archived session is session-27bf7a90-c66b-465f-aee9-624c5341042a, meta.json.started_at = 2026-07-09T23:53:22Z. The requested S465–S471 window is 2026-07-11 → 2026-07-13 (per continuation-prompt + retro dates) — entirely outside the archived corpus. 79 session dirs exist; none post-dates 2026-07-09. Archival appears to have stalled ~10 Jul. Per the skill’s own escalation rule (“archived-corpus path does not exist for a session in the range → escalate”), the efficiency metric set (metrics 1–5) cannot be computed for this window. Metric-6 raw transcripts (~7-day retention) would still be on disk for 7–14 Jul, but the archived per-worker inputs the other metrics depend on are absent.
Step 1 / S-number → uuid resolution — NO MECHANISM. The brief (and every operator trigger, retro id, continuation-prompt filename) speaks S<NNN>. The corpus is uuid-named and the procedure explicitly asserts “there is NO S naming”, ordered only by meta.json.started_at. There is no documented crosswalk from an S-window to corpus dirs, so the owner’s request cannot be mechanically scoped even if the corpus existed.
Findings lane — runnable but out of scope. product-retros.json exists (ledgers/product-retros.json, 89 records, latest S470 / 2026-07-12). The adjudication lane could run, but no candidate set was supplied and adjudication is not the owner’s focus; not executed (would require an explicit deprecated=false AND last_conflict_check unset candidate set).

Because the metric lane is dry, the evaluation below is driven from the sources the brief named directly — retro ledger (S466/S468/S469/S470), continuation prompts (S461–S471), ledger-cli task state — weighted to the three owner focus areas.

1. HEADLINE FINDINGS

The efficiency lane has been blind since 2026-07-09. Its sole input (the archived session corpus) stopped being produced ~10 Jul. Any operator-scoped sweep of a recent window currently returns zero corpus, and the procedure only escalates per-missing-session — it has no “archival-health” check to notice a systemic stall. This is the single most important operational finding.
Closed-task-reference defect CONFIRMED (owner example reproduced exactly). The S469 handoff instructs reopening the closed ID-131.
Handoff/continuation-prompt context fidelity is failing repeatedly — and the retros already say so. S470’s own failed_assumptions documents three wrong premises carried in from continuation prompts, one of which “had already wasted analysis.”
The evaluator’s friction taxonomy has no bucket for the defect class the owner cares about. Status-awareness / closed-task-reference / stale-handoff-premise are workflow-correctness defects; the friction register only models environment friction (sandbox/permission/hook/retry/tool-error).

2. FOCUS-AREA FINDINGS (owner-weighted)

(a) Closed-task-reference errors — CONFIRMED

ID-131 is done — status_note: "CLOSED S451 (39/39)…", all 39 subtasks done, updatedAt 2026-06-27.
S469 continuation prompt (2026-07-12), “Deployment Approach” table, line 41: | Planner | place bl-458 (reopen an id-131 slice or new subtask) | FIRST — migration gates everything below | Instructing a Planner to “reopen an id-131 slice” of a fully-closed 39/39 task is the exact defect the owner flagged. The “or new subtask” hedge shows partial awareness, but the leading instruction treats a closed foundational task as a live extension point. (Line 50 also attributes an entity_mentions/entity_relationships updated_at+trigger behaviour to “id-131” as if still open.)
Correct path would have been a new task / backlog-tracked migration under the ACTIVE ID-132 chain, not reopening ID-131.

(b) Task/subtask status-awareness accuracy — MIXED (active chain accurate; closed-task slip)

Accurate: S469 correctly tracks {132.35} in_progress (BI-18 NOT proven), {132.38} spec ratified, impl not started, {44.1} deferred→cancelled. Active-chain (132.x/145.x/147.x) status tracking is reliable across the window.
Inaccurate: the ID-131 reopen (a). The failure mode is specifically closed-foundational-task awareness, not live-task tracking — handoffs keep the active chain straight but mis-model tasks that closed several sessions earlier as still-mutable.

(c) start-session / handoff delivering promised context — MULTIPLE SELF-DOCUMENTED FAILURES

From S470 retro failed_assumptions (all three are handoff/continuation-prompt premises that proved false):

“Continuation-prompt premise ‘Extend UI is already in-tree for the id-117 diff viewers’ was WRONG” — Extend absent; unshipped design lock.
“The {145.14} ‘cross-tenant Authorization IDOR’ framing (carried from S467’s security review + the continuation prompt) was MISCATEGORISED … The wrong framing had already wasted analysis.” (now DR-061)
“‘Just the orphan route’ understated the item-2 re-key surface” (~14 live pre-rename files).

From S470 retro unresolved_questions — a recurring signal meeting the skill’s own ≥3-distinct-session bar:

Background subagent “idle-without-final-message” recurred across S466 → S468 → S470, cause still unknown; workaround only. This is a ≥3-session recurring finding that the (dry) efficiency lane would normally bucket and route into the A3 resolve-at-source loop — but with no corpus it is invisible to the evaluator and survives only in prose retros.

Verdict on (c): handoffs are transferring confident-but-wrong premises with no verification gate; at least one measurably wasted downstream work. The handoff skill delivers structure reliably (completed-SHAs, decision register, deployment table) but does not validate the load-bearing factual premises it carries forward.

3. RECURRING FINDINGS (from prose sources; corpus-derived surface unavailable)

Canonical key	Sessions	Status
`subagent::idle-without-final-message`	S466, S468, S470 (≥3 → signal)	cause unknown; workaround only
`handoff::false-premise-carried-forward`	S470 ×3 (Extend / IDOR / orphan-route)	one wasted analysis; no verification gate
`status-awareness::closed-task-reopen`	S469 (ID-131)	owner-flagged class

These could NOT be produced by the normal evaluate-workflow recurring-finding scan (count>=3 over events.jsonl/final_report.yaml) because the corpus is dry for the window; they were recovered by hand from retro fields.

4. META-CHECK — stale spots in the evaluator’s OWN procedure

[HIGH] Corpus archival stall undetected. Efficiency lane input dry since 2026-07-09; the procedure escalates per-missing-session but has no systemic archival-health check. Every recent-window sweep silently returns nothing.
[HIGH] No S-number → session-uuid crosswalk. Procedure hard-asserts “NO S naming”; all human-facing triggers use S-numbers. meta.json.started_at ordering is the only (manual) bridge. The owner’s own request could not be mechanically scoped.
[HIGH] Friction taxonomy can’t hold the owner’s target defect class. Classes are sandbox-denial/permission-deny/hook-block/retry-loop/tool-error (environment only). Status-awareness / closed-task-reference / stale-handoff-premise have no bucket in friction-register.md; they can only surface via archived-corpus recurring keys — which are dry. The defect the owner is probing has no durable home in the current evaluator.
[MED] Friction register 12 days stale. Last updated by the 2026-07-02 sweep. FR-003 recorded as recurred; a legacy 12-Jun 70-session review block is flagged “NOT RE-AUDITED” and never closed out.
[MED] ID-48.23 efficiency guards permanently “pending”. All three named guards (orchestrator-as-workhorse, recurring-issue-thrash, unbounded-output) are “threshold computed once the ID-48.23 per-role fields ship” — define-now/wire-later since 10 Jun. Needs a status check: if 48.23 shipped, the guards are stale-unwired; if not, they’ve been dormant ~5 weeks.
[LOW / peripheral, not evaluator-owned] ledger-cli roadmap verb broken by the initiatives.json rename. list roadmap / show roadmap → ENOENT … product-roadmap.json. The ledger is now initiatives.json; create-theme / update-roadmap / --capability-theme also reference the retired theme model. The evaluator lanes don’t call these, so they don’t block it — but they are exactly the “renamed CLI verb” staleness the owner asked to flag, and evaluate-workflow/references/metrics.md:63 still names update-roadmap-backlog (E6 class) as the write path.
[LOW] Example S-ranges in the agent/skill (S270–S276, S271, S273) reinforce the S-number framing the corpus cannot resolve — cosmetic, but compounds #2.
[OK — verified NOT stale] product-retros.json path. The agent’s warning that the canonical-repo docs/reference/product-retros.json pointer is dead is still accurate; the live file is ledgers/product-retros.json (89 records). Both skills point there correctly. Reference files (metrics.md, playbook.md, report-template.md ×2, friction-register-protocol.md, extract-friction-usage.py) all resolve.

5. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NEXT O-OF-O HANDOFF (surfaced, not authored)

Restore/repair the workflow-evaluation archival job (stalled 2026-07-09) — the efficiency lane is inert without it.
Add a handoff-authoring guard: before writing a deployment/plan table, confirm any referenced id-N is not done (a ledger-cli status check), and mark carried-forward factual premises as “unverified” so downstream doesn’t treat them as settled (directly addresses the three S470 wasted-premise cases).
Extend the friction/finding taxonomy with a workflow-correctness class (status-awareness, closed-task-reference, stale-handoff-premise) so these get durable tracking, not just prose retros.
Add an S-number↔uuid crosswalk (or stamp the S-id into meta.json) so operator-scoped sweeps resolve.
Confirm ID-48.23 status and either wire or retire the three dormant efficiency guards.

6. ESCALATIONS

Efficiency lane not run for S465–S471: archived corpus absent for the entire window (stalled ~2026-07-09). This is an abort-with-cause for the metric lane, not a skip.