Document the failure mode hit on 06/06/26: a pruned npx cache makes the
running paperclip serve GET / → 500 (deleted ui-dist) and, on restart,
crash-loop because the server's startup assertCloudDatabaseContract()
out-races the post-exec patch loop.
Records the synchronous pre-extract+patch gate now in start-paperclip.sh
(paperclip-config c824e0f), the `--help` clean-extract trick, the three
bugs found while building the fix (ui-dist vs dist marker, set -e on patch
failure, pkill -f self-match), the manual recovery runbook, and the e2e
verification.
Invariants: docs-only; touches no G*/INV-* code paths.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two latent issues surfaced today while watching the case 8174-24
end-to-end run, both worth documenting and engineering around because
they will recur on every future case.
Bug 1 — issue.released flips done→todo
After an agent successfully PATCHes its issue to "done", Paperclip's
internal issue.released action reverts the status to "todo" within
~30 seconds. This triggers a fresh wakeup of the same agent on a
task that is already complete.
Reproduced on CMPA-18 (30/04/26):
18:14:57 agent PATCH → status: done
18:15:35 Paperclip → issue.released → status: todo
18:15:54 new researcher run started
The fix at the right altitude (Paperclip itself) is outside our repo.
Mitigation in HEARTBEAT.md §3 — when an agent boots and finds the
issue in `todo` while expected outputs (file, DB rows) already exist,
it must short-circuit: post a "no change" comment, PATCH back to done,
and exit. Costs ~$0.20 per false wakeup but breaks the loop.
Bug 2 — Bash backtick trap on long comment bodies
Researcher agent built a curl pipeline like:
curl ... -d "$(python3 -c "body = '''...
📁 קובץ מחקר: `/path/to/file.md`
'''")"
The backticks around the file path (markdown convention) get
evaluated by the OUTER bash $(...) as command substitution. Bash
then tries to exec /path/to/file.md, which is not executable, and
prints "Permission denied" — a misleading error since the actual
file ownership is fine. The curl itself succeeded; only the bash
prelude noised up the log.
Fix in HEARTBEAT.md §4א: long bodies must go via Write→tempfile
then `curl -d @file`. Avoids every shell quoting edge case.
Files:
• docs/paperclip-quirks.md — new. Full writeup of both bugs plus
two prior known-quirks (CEO auto-block in_progress, INSERT vs
API for wakeups). Each section: what happens, empirical evidence
from logs, impact, workaround, status.
• .claude/agents/HEARTBEAT.md — added the self-recovery section to
§3 and the temp-file pattern to §4א. The temp-file pattern is the
canonical answer for any agent posting markdown comments —
applies to all 7 agents in this skill set.
• CLAUDE.md — referenced the new doc from the docs index.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
