Skip to content

ATM: publisher-role member is registered as 'team-mate', not 'publisher' — undocumented, breaks agent self-identification #503

Description

@randlee

Summary

The publisher agent cannot determine its own ATM identity from any documented source, and the registered name does not match the role name used everywhere else.

Evidence

atm members --team sc-compose:

team-lead   | type=team-lead    ...
comp        | type=codex        ...
comp2       | type=codex        ...
comp3       | type=codex        ...
quality-mgr | type=quality-mgr  ...
team-mate   | type=publisher    ... pane=-

The member with type=publisher is named team-mate. There is no member named publisher.

Two concrete failures this caused during the 1.4.2 release:

  1. ATM_IDENTITY is unset in the publisher session's environment, so every bare atm call fails with identity is not configured. The session-start banner reports ATM identity: team-lead, which is the parent session's identity and is actively misleading for a spawned teammate.
  2. The obvious guess (ATM_IDENTITY=publisher) is wrong. Discovering the real value required enumerating members and matching on type=.

ATM_TEAM is likewise unset, so atm send additionally fails with team is not configured until --team sc-compose or ATM_TEAM is supplied.

Working invocation:

ATM_IDENTITY=team-mate atm send quality-mgr --team sc-compose --file <task.xml>

Impact

Any agent operating in the publisher role has to rediscover this by trial and error before it can send a single ATM message — including the mandatory qa-template dispatch to quality-mgr. It is exactly the kind of undocumented operational fact the 1.4.1 postmortem's standing rule exists to prevent.

Required fix

  1. Rename the member from team-mate to publisher so the ATM name matches the role, the agent definition, and how team-lead addresses it in task assignments; or, if the name must stay, document it explicitly.
  2. Ensure ATM_IDENTITY and ATM_TEAM are exported into spawned teammate sessions so bare atm commands work without per-call flags.
  3. Record the correct identity/team invocation in docs/team-protocol.md and in docs/publishing-agent.md, per the standing rule that operational fixes get written into the repo in the same session.

Found during 1.4.2 release execution by publisher.

Activity

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions