Windows detached launch

A job backgrounded through the agent harness dies when the session ends, which loses a whole ensemble. On the user's Windows machine, launch detached with Start-Process so a later session only has to read <out>\report.txt.

Launch (Windows PowerShell 5.1: one line per code block, no &&)

cd "C:\dev\Claude Experiment\living-world"

Start-Process node -ArgumentList 'scripts/lab.mjs','--out','<out>','--seeds','<N>','--fork','<F>','--days','<D>','--dynamics','<dyn>','--branches','<list>' -WorkingDirectory "C:\dev\Claude Experiment\living-world" -RedirectStandardOutput "<out>.log" -RedirectStandardError "<out>.err.log" -WindowStyle Hidden -PassThru

• Each option and each value is its own quoted element in -ArgumentList. Never put double quotes inside an element: they do not survive the trip to the child process.
• -PassThru prints the process object: tell the user to note the Id (PID).
• -RedirectStandardOutput and -RedirectStandardError must be different files.
• Build the argument list with the lab-run-dispatcher skill if the user has not fixed one yet. For novelneed_all.mjs swap the script name and its options.
• Code must be pushed and pulled first (git pull, npm ci only if package.json changed).

Check liveness

Check the process, never file modification times. Each seed's lab_*.jsonl is a buffered stream that only touches disk when an arm finishes, so a healthy run looks untouched for minutes, and 24 seeds finish in a burst, not a trickle.

powershell.exe -NoProfile -NonInteractive -Command "Get-Process -Id <pid>"

(tasklist /FI "PID eq <pid>" also works, but only in a PowerShell window the user runs themselves; from the agent's bundled sh the slash is mangled.)

A missing PID is not yet a failure: a just-finished or very short process is legitimately gone, so check the output files before concluding anything.

If the PID is gone, check whether <out>\report.txt exists. If not, read the last lines of <out>.err.log before relaunching.

Finish and resume

• When done, the report is <out>\report.txt. To re-render it from existing data (takes seconds):

npx vite-node scripts/lab_report.ts -- <out>

• Paste back only report.txt, never progress lines.
• If the process died or the machine rebooted, re-run the same launch line with the same --out: lab.mjs skips finished seeds and resumes unfinished ones.
• After a source change, use a fresh --out; the resume guard only compares rules version.

Don't

• Don't say a run is stalled because a .jsonl mtime is old.
• Don't launch with the harness's background shell for a long run.
• Don't use pkill -f/pgrep -f with a pattern that appears in your own command line (it kills your shell); use the bracket trick, e.g. '[l]ab_seed'.