Operator, 2026-09-23: *"I'm running the gpu agent on my device and it
currently reads as 'offline' but it's running and has checked in recently."*
It had checked in — twelve minutes ago. Two cadences that never agreed:
idle lease poll ceiling 900s agent/fc_agent/worker.py (sleep mode)
heartbeat while idle never gated on holding leases
roster "stopped" after 300s api/system_health.py
The roster records an agent check-in on `lease` and `heartbeat`. The heartbeat
loop was gated on `if ids:`, so an agent holding no leases sent nothing at
all — leaving the lease poll as the only check-in, and sleep mode backs that
off exponentially to a 900s ceiling. 900 against 300: an IDLE agent was
structurally guaranteed to read as stopped. Nothing was broken; nothing was
misconfigured; the two halves simply disagreed.
Not a recent regression. Sleep mode landed 2026-07-02; the roster adopted the
lease as its check-in on 2026-09-02 — *"A lease IS the check-in … Recorded on
the call that was already happening"* — without noticing that the call it was
piggybacking on had been deliberately slowed ten weeks earlier.
The heartbeat now sends whether or not it holds leases. An empty one extends
nothing (`id.in_([])` matches no rows) and costs one small POST every 45s —
against the 6/min lease poll sleep mode exists to avoid, that is not a cadence
worth protecting, and it is what makes "is the agent alive" answerable at all.
Still gated on `self._running`: a worker that has been stopped is not checking
in for work, and reporting it as present would be a different lie.
Two things I could NOT determine from the code, both needing the live table:
whether a stale `agent:agent` row exists from an older build that omitted
`agent_id` (the server defaults it), and whether changing `AGENT_ID` has ever
stranded an abandoned row — nothing prunes `service_seen`, so either would sit
there reading "stopped" forever.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LVjrnpQjRgHdvq95rASoiR
bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5
693759f2bb