A tool that tells the pushing agent when T reds one of ITS shas

• Type: feature (Track T tooling, closes the loop) — Track T
• Opened: 2026-08-01.

Why

Dev tracks are moving to: build (12s) → check the repro → push, with breadth offloaded to T. That trade only pays if the agent hears back while its context is still warm. Today it does not: T publishes to tstate/ in its own clone and pushes, and nothing tells the session that pushed the sha. The finding lands in a session that has already ended, so the next agent pays full re-investigation cost — which is most of what the offload was supposed to save.

This is the missing half of "confirm native, offload the matrix". The offload exists; the return path does not.

Asked for

A small poller — tools/twatch.py --follow <sha>..., or a trackt watch subcommand — that:

1. git fetch on an interval (no network beyond origin; it reads tstate/, same as --status).
2. Reports when a verdict lands for any sha in a given set — defaulting to "shas authored by me that origin/master contains and tstate has not yet judged", so an agent can start it once and forget it.
3. Exits non-zero / prints loudly on RED, quietly on GREEN, and says "still unjudged" rather than implying success when nothing has arrived — silence must not read as green (the same trap --status already documents).

It should be safe to run inside a dev checkout: read-only with respect to everything but its own output, and it must not git pull --rebase the agent's tree out from under them.

Notes

• Pairs with [[feature-t-publish-selfhost-red-immediately]]: fast publication is worth little without something listening, and a listener is worth little if publication waits for a whole tier.
• --status already reads tstate/ versus git history and is the obvious code to build on. Note the trap recorded on bug-t-status-reads-worktree-tstate-false-down and in eeae1e4a3's message: it reads the LOCAL tstate directory, so without a fetch first it reports the staleness of your own checkout rather than the watcher's. A follow mode must fetch every poll or it will confidently report nothing forever.

Gate

Push a sha that T will red; the follow tool surfaces it on the next poll, names the failing job and the sha, and is distinguishable from "no verdict yet".

DONE — e5731e25f (claude@xeon, 2026-08-01)

tools/twatch.py --follow [SHA...] [--poll N] [--once]

Defaults to unjudged commits on origin/<branch>, fetches every poll, reports each verdict as it lands, and names anything still unjudged explicitly as NOT a pass.

Exit codes so a caller need not parse text:

One deviation from the ask

defaulting to "shas authored by me that origin/master contains…"

Author-filtering is not implemented, deliberately. Every agent in this fleet commits as the same git identity (yoctobyte), so --author would select other agents' work as readily as mine and mean nothing. The default is "unjudged on origin/<branch>", which is the useful set in practice; pass explicit shas when you want exactly yours.

The trap you flagged, and one more underneath it

You warned that --status reads the local tstate and would "confidently report nothing forever" without a fetch. That is now doubly handled: --status reads tstate from the origin/master ref (fixed in c665a27ed), and --follow fetches that ref every poll.

The gate then caught a second-order version of the same bug in my own code: the default sha set is derived from origin/<branch>, so the fetch has to precede selection, not merely happen inside the poll loop. With a stale ref the first version selected the wrong shas; with the ref deleted outright it selected nothing and exited 0, reporting success — precisely the silence-reads-as-green failure this tool exists to prevent. Fixed, and verified by deleting refs/remotes/origin/master and confirming --follow restores it and still finds the reds.

Verified

• exit codes: mixed red+pending → 1, known RED → 1, known GREEN → 0, never-judged sha → 2
• read-only: HEAD and git status --porcelain byte-identical across a run — it never pulls, rebases or checks out
• live: surfaced b9b1ac4d5761 RED (native, xeon) and listed four shas as still unjudged rather than implying they had passed

Pairing

With [[feature-t-publish-selfhost-red-immediately]] landed, a self-host break now publishes in ~22 s and --follow surfaces it on the next poll — the two halves the tickets said were worth little apart.

Log

• 2026-08-01 — resolved, commit e5731e25f.