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A materialization receipt stuck at executor-receipt-pending predicts child death (41/41 in one fleet) #822

Description

@drewstone

Observation

In one 281-run fleet, the reason on a child's materialized receipt separates survivors from deaths almost perfectly:

receipt reason at materialization children settled settled down mortality
executor-receipt-pending 41 41 100%
(no reason) 111 30 27%

n=152 settled children with a materialization event. No child that materialized with a pending executor receipt ever survived.

Why it costs more than it looks

15 of the 41 died cold (0 tokens). The other 26 died after doing real work: 10,337,224 input tokens and 441,045 output tokens spent on children that were already, by this signal, doomed at materialization.

Their recorded down reasons:

count reason
14 execution aborted (generic — see #820, now fixed, which should split this bucket)
3 root budget deadline exceeded
3 child deadline exceeded
2 pi exit 78: Pi profile execution controls failed: requested tool "agent_runtime_coordination_kb_record" is unavailable
2 bridge 503: cli-bridge admission timed out after 30000ms (active: 12, maxActive: 12)
1 bridge 404: no backend matches model "claude-code/tangle-router/deepseek-v4-flash"

The last three are diagnosable at or before materialization: the tool is either mounted or not, the admission queue is either full or not, and the model wire id either matches a registered backend or does not.

The ask

Is executor-receipt-pending expected to persist on a healthy child's materialization record, or does it indicate the executor never confirmed the binding? If the latter, the supervisor has a usable fail-fast signal at materialization — before the child accumulates spend that will be discarded — rather than waiting for a deadline.

Happy to supply the journals or run a targeted probe if that would help.

Measured on runtime 0.133.3/0.133.4, bridge executor, pi and claude-code harnesses (both showed the pattern).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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