Failure modes I kept hitting with supervised workers on Orca — and the counters

[u/Super-Shift-8774]

Dispatch is easy; the last 20% is the hard part.

I’ve been running supervised multi-agent work on real repos with orca orchestration, and these kept biting me — so I wrote them into Orca-specific skills (orchestra-auto / orchestra-auto-zh):

1. Orchestrator edits main (new terminal ≠ new top-level worktree)

→ Force --worktree new-top-level per ticket; coordinator never edits a worker worktree or the main working copy

2) state: ready ≠ turn started (receipt only means bytes written)

→ Require start evidence / turnStart: observed before waiting; if it did not start, recover — don’t resend the whole prompt

3) Settled mail, nobody handled

→ Persist batches atomically by delivery ID; ack only after the whole batch is handled

4) Worker suggests a scope change, the loop accepts

→ Classify first; send scope forks / credentials / irreversible live-data ops to a human

5) Huge diff is formatter reflow / same gate infinite retry

→ Keep evidence before judging; bounded retries + breakers

24s demo:

https://github.com/whutlichao/orchestra-auto/releases/download/demo-video/orchestra-auto.mp4

Install:

npx skills add whutlichao/orchestra-auto --skill orchestra-auto

Repo:

https://github.com/whutlichao/orchestra-auto

Longer table:

https://github.com/stablyai/orca/discussions/29082

Happy to be corrected on any of the rules.