Skip to main content

ADR 0057 — The gate agent waits for approval, like the dev agent waits

  • Status: accepted
  • Date: 2026-08-07
  • Context: PHASE 13b, finding AB
  • Extends: ADR 0052

Context​

ADR 0052 resolved, for the dev agent, the problem of a tool that needs approval in the middle of the loop: the agent SUSPENDS while retaining its history, and the decision resumes it with the real result in the place where the word pending would be.

The gate agents were left out of that fix, and nobody noticed because no execution ever reached them. PHASE 13b arrived.

In the 6th real execution, qa-automacao ran:

ls -la && find . -name "AGENTS.md" -o -name "package.json" | head -50

Compound command with one segment outside allow — correctly rejected, and correctly suspended by the ToolLoop. What happened next is the defect: the QaLeadServer had no clause for that outcome, fell through to the catch-all, and recorded:

delegation.failed  failureOrigin: "infra"
"QA Automation did not complete its report — unexpected ToolLoop outcome"

Two things wrong at once:

  1. the task got blocked by a decision nobody had made yet;
  2. the origin was a lie. Nothing about infrastructure failed. This contradicts the rule that ADR 0020 fixed: origin is NAMED, never obtained by elimination.

Decision​

Gate agents suspend and resume, exactly like the dev agent.

The subagent gains a third outcome, alongside {:ok, verdict} and {:blocked, info}:

{:awaiting, %{action_id:, tool_call_id:, tool_name:, ctx:}}

The whole ctx travels along — it is what makes resumption possible, and is the same choice ADR 0052 made.

The Lead becomes the one that waits. It was already a per-project GenServer, so it gained three things:

  • it subscribes to Engine.Dev.Wake for the subagents (qa-automacao, qa-performance-seguranca), because task.action_settled arrives keyed by the actor who PROPOSED the action, and the one proposing is the subspecialty;
  • it holds the in-flight state (pending) — the suspended delegation, what has already been collected, what still needs to run;
  • on {:action_settled, ...} with the action_id it is waiting for, it resumes that subagent and continues the area from the point it stopped.

What changed shape, and why​

rodar_ativas was an Enum.map over the active delegations: a straight line with no way to stop midway. It became continuar_area/4, recursive over the list of remaining ones, with the collected results accumulated. It is this shape that allows suspending between two delegations without losing the first.

Consequences​

Approval stops killing the gate. While pending, the area does not consolidate, does not emit a verdict, and does not block the task — it waits. The user's click unblocks it, instead of arriving too late.

Rejection also resumes. The reason goes in the place of the result and the agent learns that path closed, instead of waiting forever. Same rule as ADR 0052.

The infra origin stops being used for a pending decision. What is left in the catch-all is a genuinely unexpected outcome.

What this does NOT resolve​

It does not eliminate approval, and it should not. The allowlist remains a closed list and the agent keeps inventing commands — findings X, Z, and AD from PHASE 13b remain open. What changes is the consequence: what used to be a wall becomes a decision queue.

A restart in the middle of the wait loses the loop. The pending state lives in QaLeadServer's memory, and it is restart: :temporary. The dev agent solved this by persisting status in dev_agent_states; the gate has no equivalent table, and creating one is its own scope. It is left recorded as a known limitation — the gate runs again via the Dispatcher when the task returns to the cycle.

Alternatives considered​

Let the gate run with full autonomy, without going through the approval pipeline. Rejected: the gate runs commands in the dev's worktree, and the boundary exists precisely because it is third-party code being executed. Swapping the wall for a hole is not a solution.

Only fix the origin (infra → politica), without suspending. This was the intermediate step, and it was not enough: the gate kept dying, just with the right label. Honest, and useless.