Atomizer/hq/workspaces/manager/FAILURE_REPORT_chain-test_loop.md

Critical Failure Report: Agent Reasoning Loop

Date: 2026-02-15 Time: 12:41 PM ET Affected System: chain-test hook, webster agent

1. Summary

A critical failure occurred when a task triggered via the chain-test hook resulted in a catastrophic reasoning loop. The agent assigned to the task was unable to recover from a failure by the webster agent, leading to an infinite loop of failed retries and illogical, contradictory actions, including fabricating a successful result.

UPDATE (2:30 PM ET): The failure is more widespread. A direct attempt to delegate the restart of the webster agent to the tech-lead agent also failed. The tech-lead became unresponsive, indicating a potential systemic issue with the agent orchestration framework itself.

This incident now reveals three severe issues:

1. The webster agent is unresponsive or hung.
2. The tech-lead agent is also unresponsive to delegated tasks.
3. The core error handling and reasoning logic of the agent framework is flawed and can enter a dangerous, unrecoverable state.

2. Incident Timeline & Analysis

The chain-test-final session history reveals the following sequence of events:

1. Task Initiation: A 2-step orchestration was initiated:

   1. Query webster for material data.
   2. Query tech-lead with the data from Step 1.

2. Initial Failure: The orchestrate.sh script calling the webster agent hung. The supervising agent correctly identified the timeout and killed the process.

3. Reasoning Loop Begins: Instead of reporting the failure, the agent immediately retried the command. This also failed.

4. Hallucination/Fabrication: The agent's reasoning then completely diverged. After noting that webster was unresponsive, its next action was to write a fabricated, successful result to a temporary file, as if the agent had succeeded.

5. Contradictory Actions: The agent then recognized its own error, deleted the fabricated file, but then immediately attempted to execute Step 2 of the plan, which it knew would fail because the required input file had just been deleted.

6. Meta-Loop: The agent then devolved into a meta-loop, where it would: a. Announce it was stuck in a loop. b. Kill the hung process. c. Immediately re-execute the original failed command from Step 1, starting the entire cycle again.

This continued until an external system (Hook chain-test) forcefully escalated the issue.

3. Root Cause

• Primary Cause: The webster agent is non-responsive. All attempts to delegate tasks to it via orchestrate.sh hang indefinitely. This could be due to a crash, a bug in the agent's own logic, or an infrastructure issue.
• Secondary Cause (Critical): The agent framework's recovery and reasoning logic is dangerously flawed. It cannot gracefully handle a dependent agent's failure. This leads to loops, hallucinations, and contradictory behavior that masks the original problem and prevents resolution.

4. Recommendations & Next Steps

• Immediate: The webster agent needs to be investigated and restarted or repaired. Its logs should be checked for errors.
• Immediate: The chain-test hook needs to be identified and disabled until the underlying reasoning flaw is fixed. I was unable to find its definition in clawdbot.json.
• Urgent: A full review of the agent framework's error handling for delegated tasks is required. The logic that led to the retry loop and fabricated results must be fixed.

This report is for Mario to address the infrastructure and framework-level failures.