Mission 01a00538 ("ClawHDF5 REsearch and Refactor") failed 19 minutes and 93,762
tokens into its research phase with `pair failed: 403 Forbidden`, and its coding
phase was then correctly skipped as unreachable. The cause was not the coding
phase and not the model — it was pairing.
A per-mission runtime is authenticated with a SINGLE-USE pairing code, and the
bearer token it returns was cached in memory only. Any restart of the server
discarded that token; the next turn re-paired with a code the gateway had
already spent and got 403 — permanently, for that mission. A deploy, a crash or
an OOM would each do it. The durable-run machinery exists precisely so work
survives a restart; pairing was the one thread that did not, and it failed
closed.
`missions.runtime_token` persists the token at the moment pairing succeeds, and
the worker seeds the executor's cache from it, so a new process reuses the
credential instead of re-pairing. Persisting is best-effort: failing to save
must not fail a turn that just paired successfully.
Verified by reproducing the original failure: launched a mission, confirmed the
token was written, restarted the server MID-PHASE, and watched the mission run
to completion with no pairing failure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
