tracking: observer poison loop — skip-prose counted as invalid, triggering endless kill/respawn cycle

[thedotmack]

Root Cause

The observer mode prompts instruct the model to return an empty response when there is nothing to record, but the output parser only accepts <skip_summary reason="..."/> as a valid skip signal. Any empty, idle, or prose response increments consecutiveInvalidOutputs and at threshold 3 kills and respawns the SDK session, creating an infinite poison loop on low-signal sessions. This affects both the Claude provider (SDKAgent) and OpenRouter/Gemini providers.

Tracked Items

Issues

• Closes SDK session poison-loop: generator emits prose "empty observation" instead of <skip_summary/>, triggering repeated kill/respawn #2955 — SDK session poison-loop: generator emits prose "empty observation" instead of <skip_summary/>, triggering repeated kill/respawn #2955
• Closes Generator poison loop: prompt says 'return empty response' to skip, but parser only accepts <skip_summary/> — empty/prose replies poison the session #2935 — Generator poison loop: prompt says 'return empty response' to skip, but parser only accepts <skip_summary/> — empty/prose replies poison the session #2935
• Closes v13.4.0 (Linux): observer still poison-loops on prose-empty responses despite plan-11 recovery — root cause (#2749 expected behavior) not addressed #2817 — v13.4.0 (Linux): observer still poison-loops on prose-empty responses despite plan-11 recovery — root cause (#2749 expected behavior) not addressed #2817

PRs

• Related PR fix(sdk): bound Claude provider observer context to prevent overflow (#2956) #2957 — fix(sdk): bound Claude provider observer context to prevent overflow (#2956) #2957
• Related PR fix(worker): stop respawning sessions on benign "nothing to record" output #2943 — fix(worker): stop respawning sessions on benign "nothing to record" output #2943
• Related PR fix(sdk): break observer respawn loop on haiku skip-prose #2927 — fix(sdk): break observer respawn loop on haiku skip-prose #2927
• Related PR fix(observer): accept prose-empty acknowledgements without poison respawn (closes #2817) #2857 — fix(observer): accept prose-empty acknowledgements without poison respawn (closes #2817) #2857
• Related PR fix(observer): harden non-Claude observation flow #2905 — fix(observer): harden non-Claude observation flow #2905

Resolution

This is the canonical tracking issue for this root cause. Individual issues and PRs listed above will be closed in favor of this one.