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A daemon can now accept, skip, or reject a plan without a model

· 3 min read
Carefree Investments LLC
Anchor maintainers

Picking which plan to work on has always been mechanical — priority, value, fit, dependencies, none of it needs judgment. But two real gaps sat under that mechanism: a plan quoting an example header inside a code fence could be misread as its own field, and one corrupt file could take down a whole polling loop. Both are fixed, and daemons get an explicit triage mode that makes the "no model needed" property visible instead of implicit.

The false-positive fences could cause​

Plan headers are parsed with regex over the whole file. That's fine for a normal plan — until one quotes an example header inside a fenced code block, which anchor/templates/plan.md itself does. Nothing previously stopped that quoted example from being read as the plan's own Priority or Assignee.

scripts/plan_parse.py's strip_code_fences() blanks fenced content (line count preserved, so every other regex's positions stay meaningful) before any header field is extracted. plan_select.py's hot path — inventory_ready, the thing every /work bare-pick and every fleet worker's poll goes through — now runs on fence-stripped text.

Corrupt files no longer crash-loop a daemon​

_record_from_path used to call path.read_text() with no guard. One file with bad encoding, or a permission error, and the whole inventory scan raised — which meant a daemon polling a shared .plans/ tree could die on someone else's half-written .local.md.

safe_read_text() never raises. A read failure becomes (None, reason), which PlanRecord now carries as parse_error — a new, additive field that defaults to None, so nothing that already builds a PlanRecord breaks.

Three-way, not two-way​

plan_fit.py already had a mechanical take/skip split, and it's unchanged. triage_plan() adds the distinction daemons actually want: reject means never eligible for this worker, full stop (unreadable, no ## Goal, a human Assignee, unmet deps, underqualified) — a routing question doesn't even apply. Skip means eligible for someone else (overqualified, or leased by another agent). Take means eligible now.

verdict = triage_plan(record, worker)
# TriageVerdict(action=TriageAction.REJECT, reason="missing ## Goal section")

Why not just add a CommonMark library​

scripts/ is designed to be copied standalone into every project that scaffolds Anchor — every dependency added there is one every consumer has to install. A fence-aware line scan gets the real-world benefit (quoted examples can't leak into a plan's own fields) without asking every project for one more pip install.

Using it​

python scripts/work_once.py --triage --tier mid --agent-id worker-1
# take: features/add-export.md — good (Preferred: mid)
# reject: features/vendor-contract.md — assigned to alice (agents don't complete this)
# skip: features/typo-fix.md — overqualified (Preferred: small; you: mid)

No LLM, no network, no claim — just the verdict and why. fleet_watch.py --triage runs the same thing through the systemd/cron wrapper.