bug(store): a headless worker that dies before RUNNING leaves the session PENDING forever; its stderr is lost

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
75/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
python
Domain
backend, observability

Research direction

Start with _reap_dead in tether/store.py and trace how worker processes and session status are recorded. Check the existing tests for reaping dead workers, then add coverage for a PENDING session whose stored pid has exited and for preserving worker stderr in a log file. Done means dead PENDING sessions become FAILED with a useful error pointing to the captured stderr.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

What happened

tether run --headless (model claude-softmedium/opus) stored pid 3540688 and status PENDING. The worker process died without ever setting RUNNING. tether wait --timeout 3600 blocked the full hour; the session is still PENDING with 0 steps (session ses_e6c13419). The worker's stdout/stderr go nowhere, so the cause cannot be found.

Expected

  • _reap_dead also reaps PENDING sessions whose stored pid is gone (FAILED, Worker died (pid N) before starting).
  • The worker's stderr goes to a file (e.g. .tether/workers/<id>.log), and the FAILED result points to it.

Notes

tether/store.py _reap_dead only checks rec.status == "RUNNING".

Found in the v0.2.18 real-world test (tether + Haiku / qwen3.5:9b as gru minions building 11 features; log .claude/gru/active/real-world-v0218.md).

north star: 45/68 (v0.2.18) -> not measured; reliability floor (#171)

Dominant language
Python
Stars
3
Forks
1
Avg merge
52m
Merged PRs (30d)
166

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