parseHandoffAnswer joins the agent's NEXT and WHY answers with " — ", and the
prompt asks for a sentence each without naming any budget. Validate then held
that join to one authored line's 200 characters. Two ordinary sentences do not
fit, so every rotation failed.
The failure was invisible twice over. The message said "prose smuggled into
list", which named a branch the answer cannot reach: parseHandoffAnswer splits
on newlines and trims, so no authored field ever contains "\n#". The only
reachable cause was length, and the agent was never told what to shorten.
Seen live on two tasks, and it left the release transaction stuck at "prepared"
that pinned workpc-claude's only session slot (F30).
Give Action the budget of both lines, name the length in the error, and put the
limit in the prompt the agent actually reads.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011xsXyr5J1RACo71YeKG3Pu
kami
65230020b9