verifying-worker-output

Verifying Worker Output

What a coordinator does after a worker reports succeeded. Dispatching workers and the report contract they follow live in the rove skill (.claude/skills/kobe/SKILL.md); this page starts where that ends — succeeded is a claim, not a verification. Every rule here was paid for in one night of verifying 26 worker PRs; the examples are real.

flowchart TD
    R["worker reports succeeded"] --> B{branch exists?}
    B -- no --> X["report is unreliable —\nre-verify every claim in it"]
    B -- yes --> C{commits ahead of base?}
    C -- no --> E["EMPTY_BRANCH —\nnothing was committed"]
    C -- yes --> D{diff contains only the work?}
    D -- no --> P["cherry-pick onto a\nclean worktree"]
    D -- yes --> T["prove the test can fail"]
    P --> T
    T --> CI["triage red CI:\nregression / flake / hang / stale green"]
    CI --> L["land or open PR,\nwith honest caveats"]

First: does the branch exist, and does it hold commits?

A worker report can be wrong at the most basic level. One task sent two contradictory reports; one of them named a branch that did not exist, and its conclusion was the opposite of what the real branch contained. So before reading anything else in the report:

git rev-parse --verify <branch>            # the branch is real
git log origin/main..<branch> --oneline    # it is ahead of the base

Empty git log output means nothing was committed — the worker may have done the work and reported success with it still sitting uncommitted in the worktree. rove api land refuses this case with EMPTY_BRANCH (or EMPTY_BRANCH_DIRTY_WORKTREE when the uncommitted work is recoverable), so land failing this way is the signal, not an obstacle.

rove api collect --task-ids <a,b,c> batches this for a fleet: per task it returns the branch, uncommitted .changes, and .base (commits ahead + diffstat vs the base branch) in one read.

If the branch doesn't exist or is empty, stop trusting the report wholesale — everything else in it needs independent verification too.