[nwparker]

	Files	Added	Deleted	Net
Test	8	$\color{#1a7f37}{\Huge{\mathbf{+}}}$​375	$\color{#cf222e}{\Huge{\mathbf{−}}}$​15	$\color{#1a7f37}{\Huge{\mathbf{+}}}$​360
Prod	8	$\color{#1a7f37}{\Huge{\mathbf{+}}}$​108	$\color{#cf222e}{\Huge{\mathbf{−}}}$​19	$\color{#1a7f37}{\Huge{\mathbf{+}}}$​89

Stacked on #17969. Closes four defects an adversarial design review found in the lease stack (#17957 → #17969). Four commits, each independently reviewable.

S11 — an expired lease is now matched on the leaf's current tab

getRecentExpiredSshLease required lease.tabId === tabId, against a tabId frozen at lease-write time. After detachTerminalPaneToTab moves a pane A→B, the lease still says A. Added findCurrentTerminalTabIdForLeaf (runtime leaves → ptysById paneKey → both persisted workspace partitions, mirroring restoreReattachedPtyRuntime/findTerminalTabIdForLeaf) and compare against currentTabId ?? lease.tabId.

Correction to my brief: I claimed the stale-coordinate direction produces a duplicate spawn. In the fixture it is already refused first by the handle CAS (terminal_not_found), so the lease resolver is a second, independent refusal — the test asserts that directly rather than overstating it. The cleanly demonstrable defect is the reverse: correct coordinates → terminal_not_recoverable. A moved pane could only be addressed through the tab it had left.

The lease.leafId === undefined wildcard was deliberately left alone — tightening it would strand leases whose leafId the non-UUID normalisation stripped.

S2 — expired → attached on a proven reattach

expired was absorbing: a lease that reattached and proved itself alive stayed expired forever, so ssh:reset skipped it, terminateSessions marked it not-owned, and the quit sweep skipped it.

The edge is gated on ptyIds being present, because only the id-qualified caller (markSshRemotePtyLeasesAttachedAsync, fed the relay's attachedLeaseIds) carries per-pty proof — an unqualified bulk mark still cannot revive. terminated stays absorbing. Re-entering attached clears supersededBy/relayIdRecycled, so the impossible "attached with a supersession mark" state cannot occur.

S1 — the gate now requires a positive death certificate

The gate refused on live/unverifiable but passed on null — and null was indistinguishable from a certified death, because the register deleted on exited and is an in-memory Map, empty at every app start.

Inverting the polarity alone would have made panes unrecoverable, so this is four coupled changes:

1. exited is now retained rather than deleted — the register is three-valued on disk, not just in the type (markPtyLivenessExited).
2. The two writers holding host evidence now record it instead of dropping the doubt: onPtyExit (exitCode >= 0 || hostExitConfirmed) and the controller-inventory sweep (observed === false).
3. ssh-relay-session.ts — the absence branch of handlePtyReattachFailure calls runtime.onPtyExit(appPtyId, -1, undefined, { hostExitConfirmed: true }) alongside the renderer pty:exit.
4. The gate becomes if (liveness?.status !== 'exited') throw.

Two corrections to my brief, both from the implementer reading further than I did. (a) :2839 is the isSshPtyNotFoundError && !identityMismatch branch — the relay positively answered "no such pty"; transport failures return early at :2814 and never write expired. So the right verdict there is exited, not unverifiable. (b) preservesAbnormalSshSurface does run in production, whenever the relay delivers a -1 exit frame; only the pinned test's comment named the wrong path, so the comment was corrected rather than the mechanism.

The trade, stated: recovery is now reachable only via expired + exited, and change (3) supplies that pairing. Every expired writer that records nothing fails closed, and each was checked — suppressRetiredReattachedPty (deliberate retirement), the persistPtyBinding refusal (already writes live), supersession and relayIdRecycled (already refused upstream), and the two spawn-failure sites (which proceed to a fresh spawn anyway).

One real behaviour change: after ssh:resetRelay, a stale viewer's recoverPane now gets terminal_not_recoverable instead of a fresh shell. Left deliberately — that finally block runs even when forceStopRelayForTarget threw, so it cannot distinguish an acknowledged kill from an unverifiable one. Normal reconnect spawn is unaffected. (#17962 fixes that finally; this is the one place a genuinely dead pane loses this particular recovery route until it lands.)

stable-owner.ts:255 was deliberately not changed: under change (2) it stops being an erasure and becomes a positive exited write, matching what that branch's own predicate asserts one line later. Narrowing isPtyAlreadyGoneError's /Session not found/i message match is a separate, riskier change — filed rather than folded in.

S5 — the strict predicate now guards the transport that actually recovers

isSshSessionGoneError at remote-runtime-pty-transport.ts:1603, replacing a bare substring test. terminal.recoverPane has exactly one caller, and it was the one still matching the identity-mismatch message this whole stack argues is not evidence of absence.

User-facing regressions

One, named above (post-resetRelay viewer recovery). Otherwise none — negative controls pass both ways: unverifiable still refuses, live still refuses, a host-confirmed exit still recovers, a terminated lease stays absorbing, an unqualified bulk attach cannot revive, and the two "leaves a live shell running" relay branches still assert runtime.onPtyExit is not called.

Testing

Every commit has failing-before output in its message. Highlights:

× refuses to recreate a shell for an expired lease with no liveness evidence at all
+ { "handle": "term-replacement", "ptyId": "pty-replacement", … }   ← spawned a shell on zero evidence
× recovers a moved SSH pane through the tab it now sits in, not the one its lease froze
× reclaims an expired lease that the relay reattached… — state "expired" (expected "attached")
× does not recover a pane whose relay reply was an identity mismatch

pnpm tc all projects; oxlint 0 errors; check:code-quality:changed 0 new findings across 43 files; max-lines ratchet OK with no suppressions. Targeted suites 3019 passed / 17 skipped; renderer terminal-pane 4118 passed. A whole-tree src/main/{runtime,ssh,ipc} run shows 543 failures baselined at 544 on the same tree without these changes — pre-existing parallel-run AppEnvironment not initialized failures, not regressions.

Residual: expired readers this stack does not update

This stack splits what expired means — it now covers both "the client lost its route" and, when carrying supersededBy / relayIdRecycled, "the route is dead for good". Three main-side readers still test state === 'expired' as a single undifferentiated state and are not updated here:

• src/main/ipc/ssh-connection-handlers.ts — both the ssh:reset bulk-expire and the SSH_TERMINATE_RECONNECT_REQUIRED ownership fence in ssh:terminateSessions
• src/main/ssh/ssh-orphan-relay-pty-sweep.ts
• src/main/persistence/leasing-ssh-ptys/ssh-pty-kill-intent-operations.ts

The commit "let a proven reattach take an expired lease back to attached" addresses this indirectly: a lease that reattaches and proves itself alive returns to attached and re-enters all three paths normally. So this is residual risk, not a live regression — but a lease that is never re-proven stays outside those paths for as long as it stays expired. Migrating those three readers onto sshRemotePtyLeaseAllowsReattach (or an explicit orphan-vs-retired predicate) is deliberately left as follow-up rather than widened into this stack.

Rebase note

Rebased onto current main after the 32 SSH PRs landed. One pre-existing ratchet in main was updated as part of this PR because this stack's behaviour change invalidates it: src/main/persistence-async-write-syscalls.test.ts asserted an expired lease stays expired through markSshRemotePtyLeasesAttachedAsync. That call is id-qualified, so a named pty that proved itself alive now returns to attached. terminated stays absorbing and an unqualified bulk mark still cannot revive — both still asserted.

[nwparker]

Semantic conflict with #17963 — and I think #17963 is right

Building a combined adhoc branch surfaced a direct contradiction between this PR and #17963 in ssh-relay-orphan-abandon-paths.test.ts. They assert opposite things about the same branch:

#17963 (merged into the combined branch first):

"pty.attach answers not-found both when it verified the pid is dead AND when its session map simply has no such id — which is every id after a relay restart… The client cannot tell those apart, so this branch may release the id but must not certify a death."

This PR:

"pty.attach verifies process liveness before answering not-found, so this is the one branch with positive proof of death"

and on that basis adds:

expect(runtime.onPtyExit).toHaveBeenCalledWith(APP_PTY_ID, -1, undefined, {
  hostExitConfirmed: true
})

Why I think this PR's premise is wrong

I checked the relay's own not-found path. pty-handler.ts:1936 throws PTY "id" not found for !managed || managed.disposed with no liveness check at all. Only the second branch (:1943, !isProcessAlive(pid)) is positive evidence. So "not-found" is the union of "I checked and it's dead" and "I have no such id."

The pty2:<epoch>:<n> mint does not rescue the premise — it makes it worse in the case that matters. After a relay restart the epoch changes, so every id from the previous relay is unknown to the new one, and pty.attach answers not-found for all of them — while the shells themselves may be perfectly alive. That is precisely the population hostExitConfirmed: true would now certify as dead.

So handlePtyReattachFailure's absence branch is unverifiable, not exited, and the correction I passed you mid-task ("the right verdict there is exited") was wrong. I'd taken the branch's own comment at face value; #17963's ratchet exists because that comment is false, and its wording is the more careful one.

What this means for S1

The S1 fix still stands in shape — the gate should require a positive death certificate rather than passing on null — but this is not the writer that can supply it. Recovery must be sourced from a verdict written where the host genuinely attested exit: an SshPtyExitPayload delivered for the live incarnation (retireExitedPty), a host-reports-absent listing, or a fulfilled provider.shutdown. Not from a reattach that failed to find an id.

That likely means the post-resetRelay behaviour change you flagged is broader than one case: with change (3) removed, more expired panes fail closed at the gate. That is the trade to re-examine — and it is the reason I asked you to stop if inverting the polarity made panes unrecoverable. It may.

Requested

Please re-open this one item: drop or rework change (3) so nothing certifies death from a not-found reattach, then re-check whether the S1 gate still leaves genuinely-dead panes recoverable. If it does not, say so — an unrecoverable pane is as bad as a duplicated one, and that answer is more useful than a forced fix.

S11, S2 and S5 are unaffected by this and look right.

Excluded from the combined adhoc for now. The other eight branches merged cleanly and are being exercised; this one waits on the above.

[pullfrog]

✅ No new issues found.

Reviewed changes — tightens the SSH pane-recovery liveness gate across four commits, closing four defects found in the lease-stack design review.

• Match expired leases on the leaf's current tab — getRecentExpiredSshLease resolves the pane's live tab through findCurrentTerminalTabIdForLeaf (leaves → ptysById paneKey → both persisted workspace partitions) and compares currentTabId ?? lease.tabId, so a moved pane recovers through the tab it now sits in and refuses the coordinates it left.
• Revive expired → attached on id-qualified reattach — updateSshRemotePtyLeaseStates lets markSshRemotePtyLeasesAttachedAsync (fed by the relay's attachedLeaseIds) reclaim a proven-alive lease, clearing supersededBy/relayIdRecycled; terminated and unqualified bulk marks stay absorbing.
• Require a positive death certificate — exited verdicts are retained rather than dropped, onPtyExit and the controller-inventory sweep record exited instead of forgetting, the relay absence branch reports onPtyExit(..., { hostExitConfirmed: true }), and the gate flips to liveness?.status !== 'exited'.
• Narrow the viewer transport to isSshSessionGoneError — the bare SSH_SESSION_EXPIRED substring test now excludes the identity-mismatch suffix, which the relay answered for a live PTY.

I verified the two load-bearing invariants behind the retention change: registerPty clears the verdict on every (re)spawn/reattach so a retained exited never leaks across incarnations, and the other getPtyLivenessVerdict readers (orchestration worker/federation observation, close-describe, unstopped-pty verification) only dispatch on unverifiable/live, so the null → exited shift is behavior-neutral there. The observed === false inventory writer is a genuinely host-answered absence (queriedHostIds guard), consistent with the documented contract. The added/changed tests carry exact assertions (concrete state transitions, toHaveBeenCalledWith on onPtyExit, not.toHaveBeenCalled negative controls) and would fail against the prior behavior.

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[pullfrog]

Important

The four commits were rewritten, and S1's headline change — "require a positive death certificate before recreating a pane" — was walked back, but the PR title and body were not updated to match. The title still promises a death-certificate gate, and the body's S1 section still says "the gate becomes if (liveness?.status !== 'exited') throw", that the reattach-failure absence branch calls onPtyExit(..., { hostExitConfirmed: true }), and that the inventory sweep records exited. None of that is in the code anymore. This matters because a reviewer or future reader relying on the description will believe recovery is stricter than it actually is.

Reviewed changes — the delta since the prior Pullfrog review reverses the "positive death certificate" half of S1 and keeps the rest.

• Reverted the recovery gate from exited-required to live/unverifiable-refused — recoverTerminalPane now throws only when the verdict is live or unverifiable and passes on null, which is the pre-PR behavior.
• Removed the two exited-fabricating writers — deleted markPtyLivenessExited, reverted the controller-inventory sweep's observed === false arm back to forgetPtyLivenessVerdict, and dropped the onPtyExit(..., { hostExitConfirmed: true }) call from the reattach-failure absence branch.
• Kept exited retention and onPtyExit recording — rememberPtyLivenessVerdict still retains an earned exited, and onPtyExit still records it from a host-delivered exit frame, so the register stays three-valued.
• Inverted the recovery-gate test surface — the "refuses to recreate on no liveness evidence" case became a positive "recreates a shell the relay disowned" test in terminal-pane-recovery-liveness-gate.test.ts, with exact live/unverifiable/exited controls.

⚠️ The description still claims a strict gate the code no longer implements

The reversal is technically sound — the author is right that requiring exited would close the gate permanently, because a host-delivered exit frame tombstones the lease terminated (ssh-relay-session.ts:2230), so exited never co-occurs with a reattachable expired lease. But the description was not brought along, and the reversal has a real consequence the body still claims was avoided: it re-opens recovery for the expired writers that record no liveness verdict, which the prior review verified "fail closed" under the old gate.

Technical details

# PR title/body no longer match the reverted recovery gate

## Affected sites
- PR #18013 title — still says "require a host death certificate before recreating a pane"; the gate now passes on `null`.
- PR body S1 section — claims `if (liveness?.status !== 'exited') throw`, an absence-branch `onPtyExit(hostExitConfirmed: true)`, and an inventory sweep that records `exited`. All three are gone.
- PR body "One real behaviour change" — says post-`ssh:resetRelay` a stale viewer's `recoverPane` returns `terminal_not_recoverable`. Under the reverted gate the `expired` lease written at `ssh-connection-handlers.ts:70` carries no verdict, so it now recreates a fresh shell.
- `src/main/runtime/orca-runtime-resolve-terminal-pane.ts:113-115` — actual gate: `if (liveness?.status === 'unverifiable' || liveness?.status === 'live') throw`.

## Required outcome
- Rewrite the title and S1 section to state that the gate refuses on `live`/`unverifiable` and otherwise recovers, and that "host death certificate" is no longer the mechanism (the register's three-valued `exited` is retained, but the gate never observes it because `exited` only co-occurs with a `terminated` lease).
- Reconcile the "One real behaviour change" paragraph: confirm whether the resetRelay → fresh-shell behavior is now intended, and either document it or restore the stricter refusal.

## Open questions for the human
- Is the fail-open behavior for the null-verdict `expired` writers (`suppressRetiredReattachedPty`, reset-relay) an accepted trade-off, or should those paths also write `unverifiable` so the gate refuses?

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[pullfrog]

Important

The prior review's concern is still open: the title and body still describe a "positive death certificate" gate that the code no longer implements. The new commit here is a correct test ratchet fix, but it does not touch the title/body, so that must-address finding remains blocking.

Reviewed changes

• Updated the persistence reattach ratchet — persistence-async-write-syscalls.test.ts now expects a named expired pty-2 to persist as attached after an id-qualified markSshRemotePtyLeasesAttachedAsync, matching the S2 reclaim. pty-4 (terminated) still stays absorbing and the untouched pty-3 stays detached, so the assertions are exact and would fail against the pre-S2 behavior.
• Rebased the four feature commits — no content change; the gate still refuses on live/unverifiable and passes on null (orca-runtime-resolve-terminal-pane.ts:113), consistent with what the prior review saw.

⚠️ Title and body still describe the walked-back gate

The delta is a test-only fix plus a rebase, so the mismatch flagged in the prior review is untouched. The title promises "require a host death certificate before recreating a pane," and the body's S1 section still says "the gate becomes if (liveness?.status !== 'exited') throw", that the reattach-failure absence branch calls onPtyExit(..., { hostExitConfirmed: true }), and that the inventory sweep records exited. None of that is in the code — the gate is if (liveness?.status === 'unverifiable' || liveness?.status === 'live') throw, the absence branch is commented "Deliberately does NOT call runtime.onPtyExit" (ssh-relay-session.ts:2903), and the sweep's observed === false arm reverts to forgetPtyLivenessVerdict (orca-runtime-refresh-pty-worktree-records-with-controller-inventory.ts:294). A reviewer or future reader relying on the description will believe recovery is stricter than it is.

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