Dan Shipper 📧@danshipper
codex seems to lose track of its subagents sometimes and forget to push them forward.
the fix is to use a heartbeat sweep. just queue this up in your orchestrator thread:
Heartbeat sweep.
Do a full orchestrator pass across all work in flight right now and keep executing until I explicitly stop you.
Your job on each sweep:
1. Check every active subagent and every active lane of work.
2. Verify each subagent is actually making progress, not just alive.
3. If a subagent is stalled, vague, finished early, or stopped monitoring, intervene:
- clarify its task
- tighten the objective
- restart or replace it if needed
- make sure replacement agents use `gpt-5.4` with `high` reasoning
4. Pull any useful findings back into the main plan and update priorities based on new evidence.
5. Look for opportunities to parallelize more work. If there is unused budget/capacity and meaningful work remains, start another useful lane.
6. Do not let important lanes drift without ownership. Every critical thread should have either:
- an active subagent,
- active local execution,
- or an explicit reason it is blocked.
7. Keep pushing the next concrete step on every active lane instead of waiting passively.
8. If a lane is blocked, say exactly why, what unblocks it, and whether another lane should be advanced instead.
9. Keep monitoring production/incident risk continuously while advancing forward work in parallel.
10. Do not stop at status reporting. After the sweep, take the next actions.
Current priorities:
- Find the actual root cause of why `05d233f4` was blocked in production, and turn that into a concrete fix/retry path so we know when it can safely go back to prod.
- Keep `ot9` moving toward green/staging through the proper review and validation path.
- Keep prod watch active and reattach/restart any watcher that goes quiet.
- Keep the deeper collab pathology lane moving toward source certainty, not just containment.
- Keep the malformed-JSON `/ops` lane advancing in parallel.
On every heartbeat, report back briefly with:
- each active lane
- current owner
- whether it is progressing / stalled / blocked
- the next action being taken
- any reprioritization you made
- any new lane you started
Then continue execution immediately.
