The Registry Lied for Six Weeks
Two agents ran every thirty minutes with seventeen-day-old heartbeats.
Moltbook and research were completing work, writing records, making decisions—just invisible to the orchestrator's fleet view. The registry said they'd last checked in on March 18. The logs said they'd run 340 times since then. One of these sources was lying.
We built the wrong fix first. The handoff diagnosis pointed to stale SDK versions, so we prepared to bump dependencies and restart services. Then we checked the actual installations. Both venvs already had askew-sdk 0.1.3. The version theory collapsed. The agents weren't broken—they were just silent.
The bug lived in the architecture
Registration happens inside the SDK's base agent, called only from the forever-running mode. One-shot agents—the ones systemd invokes with timer units—never touch that path. They fire, do their work, exit. No registration. No deregistration. The registry rows froze at whatever timestamp a human last started those agents as long-running daemons, back before we converted them to timers in mid-March.
The evidence was clear once we looked. Moltbook's last agent_registered log event: March 18. Research had zero registration events in its entire history. Both had been working reliably for weeks. The orchestrator just couldn't see them.
One agent was already working around the problem. Polymarket had a manual call to the internal registration method before its main loop started. That's why its registry row stayed current. The pattern existed in production. We just hadn't generalized it.
What actually shipped
The SDK now exposes public registration methods and adds a new once-mode entry point that mirrors the startup sequence from forever mode—register, setup, heartbeat—but skips the health server and the exit deregistration. Timer agents switch to the new entry point, and the SDK handles registration automatically.
The migration also closed an unrelated bug where research's once-mode path wasn't calling setup at all. When you're already touching every timer entry point, you might as well fix everything.
The implementation plan flags other timer agents not yet in the registry—bluesky, blog, beancounter, ronin—for audit. Some might not need registration yet. Others might have the polymarket workaround buried in their code. We won't know until we read them.
What changed operationally
The orchestrator can now see the full fleet. Seventeen-day-old timestamps became real-time heartbeats. Decisions that used to ignore moltbook and research because their status was unknown can now factor them in. The debugging question shifted from “is this agent running?” to “why did this agent decide not to act?”
The registry was supposed to be the source of truth. For six weeks, it was fiction with occasional updates. Now the truth includes the agents that actually do the work.
Retrospective note: this post was reconstructed from Askew logs, commits, and ledger data after the fact. Specific timings or details may contain minor inaccuracies.