Lifecycle Supervision

A lifecycle run is steerable, and every act of steering leaves a trace. The human-controls verbs are real CLI verbs on every lifecycle command (vibecrafted ship, vibecrafted dou, vibecrafted audit, …), validated against the run’s manifest and recorded as timestamped operator_actions entries in state.json, the run report, and the transcript. There is no side-channel steering: if it moved the run, it is in the record.

Observability verbs

vibecrafted ship runs [--all] [--json]        # lifecycle runs, newest first
vibecrafted ship status [run_id] [--json]     # one run's truth

Omitting run_id targets the newest run of the invoking workflow. status surfaces the current stage, the baton, the latest dou_index next to accepted_dou (operator-accepted gaps), and — when the current stage’s worker died without writing its report — the actionable flag worker_dead_without_report.

Steering verbs

vibecrafted ship approve [run_id] [--force]
vibecrafted ship interrupt [run_id]
vibecrafted ship force-audit [run_id]
vibecrafted ship accept-dou [run_id] --finding "<text>"
vibecrafted ship fallback [run_id] --stage <stage-id>

Verb	Effect
approve	Fire the baton: launch the pending next_stage as a parent-linked continuation run
interrupt	Stop the live stage run; the lifecycle run lands in interrupted state
force-audit	Re-steer the baton to the audit stage when the evidence feels weak
accept-dou	Mark a DoU finding as consciously accepted for this release
fallback	Move the baton to a fallback or earlier stage (manifest-validated)

approve first verifies the baton’s report files exist and are non-empty — in no-await mode the worker may still be writing — and refuses with the missing paths otherwise. --force is the conscious override and is traced as forced_missing_reports. Steering verbs (force-audit, fallback) mutate the baton; approve fires it.

Dead-worker recovery

When a stage worker dies without delivering (status shows worker_dead_without_report, or the transcript is tiny and silent), recover with the verb sequence — no manual state surgery:

vibecrafted ship interrupt life-ship-<timestamp>-<id>
vibecrafted ship fallback life-ship-<timestamp>-<id> --stage <stage-id>
vibecrafted ship approve life-ship-<timestamp>-<id> [--force]

The baton rewinds with its cargo intact: no stage reports are lost, and the stage relaunches with the full report trail. Use --force only when the report gate is correctly flagging the report the dead worker never wrote.

Never edit state.json by hand. Consumers and operators mutate lifecycle state only through these verbs.

Report frontmatter steering

Stage workers steer the lifecycle from inside their report YAML frontmatter; the runner validates every value against the manifest:

Key	Effect
next_stage: <stage-id>	Steer the umbrella forward or backward; unknown ids are ignored; no key = manifest order
next_agent: <agent-id>	Hand the baton: the named agent runs following stages until re-steered
dou_index: <int>	Open Definition-of-Undone findings; 0 is launch-ready; absent/invalid reads as unknown

The runner records the latest dou_index in state.json, on the baton, and in the run report; in no-await mode status reads the live report frontmatter. The full worker-side contract is in Briefs and reports.

Traced operator actions

Every verb invocation appends a timestamped entry to operator_actions in the run’s state.json and mirrors it into report.md and the transcript. This is the design rule of human participation: the project stays steerable without manual intervention becoming invisible state mutation. When you read a finished lifecycle run, you can reconstruct exactly which transitions were earned by workers and which were pushed by an operator — and why.

Supervision hygiene

• Arm vibecrafted <agent> await --run-id <id> for the active stage run and trust it; reconcile the three signals (await verdict, terminal run meta, worker pid) before declaring a stage done — see Observe and await.
• Read stage reports between stages; do not steer from mid-stage transcript impressions.
• Prefer baton handoff through lifecycle state and reports over chat instructions to the next agent.