Stuck Crewmate Recovery

stuck-crewmate-recovery

Use this playbook when a direct report is stale, looping, repeatedly confused, asking a question its brief already answers, unresponsive, or when a steer failed to land.

Load harness-adapters before sending an interrupt, exit command, resume command, or harness-specific skill invocation. The target window's harness is recorded as harness= in state/<id>.meta.

Escalate in order:

1. Peek the pane.
2. If the crewmate is waiting on a question its brief already answers, answer in one line via FM_HOME=<this-firstmate-home> bin/fm-send.sh from an active firstmate session unless FM_HOME is already set to the active firstmate home.
3. If the crewmate is confused or looping, interrupt with the adapter's interrupt key, then redirect with one corrective line. For example, for a single-Escape adapter: FM_HOME=<this-firstmate-home> bin/fm-send.sh <window> --key Escape.
4. If the crewmate is genuinely wedged after redirection, exit the agent with the adapter's exit command and relaunch with the same brief plus a progress so far note appended to it. Genuine wedging means looping, unresponsive, repeating the same obstacle, or truly dead. A low context reading is not wedging; modern harnesses auto-compact and keep going. The worktree and commits persist, so relaunch is cheap.
5. If a second relaunch fails too, write failed to the backlog and tell the captain with evidence.