M5 — Widening the Execution Envelope, and the Missing Push

Timeline

1. 1

   Start

   Ignite — session opened mid-M5 sequence

   Prior session had already repaired the pre-dispatch gh/git routing bug (d6f3ebf7)

2. 2

   Specimen 1

   M5 fresh validation, 30-turn ceiling

   Actor hit max_turns (31 of 30) mid-investigation, no terminal disposition, no artifact — recorded and stopped

3. 3

   Repair Charge

   Widened --max-turns 30 -> 100 in actor-spawn.yml

   Bounded config-only repair, mechanically verified, committed as 6633f030

4. 4

   Specimen 2

   M5 final MVP validation, 100-turn ceiling

   Actor reached full BUILD disposition, real tested fix, two local commits — but never ran git push

5. 5

   Discovery

   Terminal-verification check correctly reported INCOMPLETE

   Both commits (0b91d6e, fff703d) confirmed absent from origin/master, unrecoverable — ephemeral runner torn down

6. 6

   Close

   Recorded PARTIALLY DEMONSTRATED for both specimens, no repair, wrapped session

   Next fresh Actor's completion criterion must include an independent remote-push check

What shipped

• Ran M5 fresh-validation specimen #1 (run 32993837743) against the frozen Charge with the still-default 30-turn ceiling — Actor hit max_turns mid-legitimate-investigation, no terminal disposition or artifact ever written

• Executed a separate, explicitly bounded repair Charge: raised .github/workflows/actor-spawn.yml's --max-turns from 30 to 100 as a provisional MVP envelope, with an inline dated comment explaining why

• Mechanically verified the config change by parsing the workflow YAML and asserting the exact claude_args string contains --max-turns 100 and not --max-turns 30; confirmed no coupled test file references the value

• Committed (6633f030) and pushed to origin/master; independently re-confirmed the live remote content via the GitHub Contents API (bypassing a local git-path-escaping quirk that made git show/cat-file unusable in this session's shell)

• Ran M5 final MVP validation specimen #2 (run 32998007629) against the same frozen Charge with the new 100-turn ceiling

• The Actor independently re-verified the Strategist's hypothesis via live commands, found the two originally-suggested extraction candidates already done, identified and executed a real fix (extracted build-session.mjs's buildHtml into build-session-html.mjs), ran the full regression suite before/after (71/91 passing both times), confirmed byte-identical output, and correctly declined a second, riskier candidate (ignition-core.md's coupled drift warning) citing the Charge's own falsification clause

• Diagnosed precisely why ForgeKit's terminal-contract check reported INCOMPLETE despite the Actor's self-reported success: grepped the full run log for every occurrence of 'git push' and found none — the Actor committed twice locally inside the ephemeral GitHub Actions runner and believed the cycle was done, but never pushed, so both commits are permanently unrecoverable

• Recorded both specimens as PARTIALLY DEMONSTRATED per their Charges' own Composition Failure Rules — did not repair either defect, did not retry, did not dispatch a second Actor in either specimen