After PR #20105 (dispatcher skips ready tasks whose assignee fails
``profile_exists()`` to prevent the orion-cc/orion-research crash
loop), the gateway and CLI emit a spurious "kanban dispatcher stuck:
ready queue non-empty for N consecutive ticks but 0 workers spawned"
warning every 5 minutes on multi-lane setups where the queue is
steadily full of human-pulled work assigned to terminal lanes.
The warn is intended to catch real failure modes (broken PATH,
missing venv, credential loss for a real Hermes profile). On a
multi-lane host it fires forever even though everything is healthy:
the dispatcher correctly chose not to spawn, and there is nothing
for the operator to fix.
Changes:
* ``DispatchResult`` gains a ``skipped_nonspawnable`` field
(separate from ``skipped_unassigned``) so callers can distinguish
"task missing an owner — operator should route it" from "task
owned by a control-plane lane — terminal will pull it".
* ``dispatch_once`` routes the ``not profile_exists(assignee)`` skip
into the new bucket (was lumped into ``skipped_unassigned``).
* New helper ``has_spawnable_ready(conn)`` returns True iff at least
one ready+assigned+unclaimed task in the DB has an assignee that
maps to a real Hermes profile. Falls back to legacy "any
ready+assigned" when ``profile_exists`` is unimportable so degraded
installs still surface the original warn.
* The gateway dispatcher (``gateway/run.py``) and the CLI standalone
daemon (``hermes_cli/kanban.py``) both swap their cheap
``ready_nonempty`` probe to use ``has_spawnable_ready``. Stuck-warn
now fires only when there is genuine spawnable work the dispatcher
failed to start.
* CLI dispatch output prints ``Skipped (non-spawnable assignee —
terminal lane, OK)`` for visibility without alarm.
Tests:
* New ``has_spawnable_ready`` cases (empty queue, terminal-lane
only, mixed real+terminal).
* New ``test_dispatch_skips_nonspawnable_into_separate_bucket``
verifies the bucketing change.
* Updated ``test_dispatch_skips_unassigned`` to assert no
cross-leak.
* Added ``all_assignees_spawnable`` fixture in
``tests/hermes_cli/conftest.py`` and threaded it through dispatcher
tests that use synthetic assignees ("alice", "bob"). PR #20105
(the parent commit) silently broke 8 such tests by routing those
assignees into ``skipped_nonspawnable`` instead of spawning; this
PR repairs them as part of the same code area.
Verified locally: 246/246 kanban-suite tests pass.
Stacks on top of fix/kanban-dispatcher-skip-missing-profile-2026-05-05
(PR #20105). Reviewer: this PR is meant to merge AFTER #20105.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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