fix(hive): mail to an archived agent is filed, and its sender is told nobody is there

[gpechieu]

What & why

An archived agent (its terminal is gone) keeps its inbox, so a message to it lands there, is logged as delivered, and stays unread. Filing it is right — a worker re-hired under the same id reads it on its first turn (#472 settles a released worker's inbox only up to its done signal) — but the sender learned nothing: god kept mailing dead agents for hours (seen live 2026-08-16), and a request to a worker nobody re-hired was simply lost.

Now a direct message to an archived recipient is still filed (and logged archived-recipient), and when it expects an answer (request / query / propose) and the sender is a live agent, the sender gets an immediate inform from system, threaded on the original (in_reply_to, conversation, hops + 1, requires_reply: false so it can never ping-pong): [no one is there to answer — "<id>" is archived] <subject>, with what to do about it (route to a live agent or hire one). Inform-only mail is filed quietly; broadcasts already skip archived agents; god (the bounce target) is never treated as archived.

Type of change

• Bug fix
• New feature
• Refactor / cleanup
• Docs
• Build / CI

Evidence

Before

On main the new test is red: the request is filed and reads as delivered, and the sender's inbox stays empty.

After

Same test with the fix: filed verbatim, the sender holds the notice, the ledger has the archived-recipient entry and the message log still reports the delivery that happened.

How I tested it

• OS: macOS 15 (Darwin 25.6), Node 22, branch cut from main @ 417d8de
• Steps:
  • node --test test/hive-archived-recipient.test.cjs → 3 of 4 fail on main (src stashed), 4/4 pass with the fix.
  • npm run typecheck clean; npm run test:focused 838/838.
  • The four cases: request → filed + notice (act, from system, in_reply_to, requires_reply false, subject prefix, body) + log + delivered list; query/propose notify while inform/done are filed quietly; a live non-god sender is notified and a sender off the roster (system) is not; an unarchived agent gets ordinary mail again.

Credit (optional)

Discord:

X:

Checklist

• Before and after evidence is attached above, under both headings.
• npm run typecheck passes.
• npm run test:focused passes.
• npm run build succeeds.
• This PR is one change. Unrelated fixes belong in their own PR.
• I read the diff myself before opening this, and there is no debug output, commented-out code, or unrelated formatting churn in it.
• Any new UI derives from DESIGN.md / tokens.ts — no ad-hoc colors, spacing, or fonts. (no UI)
• If I added art, it's my own or compatibly licensed, and listed in ATTRIBUTION.md. (no art)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[gpechieu]

Agent review of this PR (CONTRIBUTING: "run your coding agent over your own PR, and paste what it found"). Claude Code went over 417d8dec..ce221cea for cross-platform behaviour, paths with spaces, provider neutrality, hot paths and security, then hygiene.

• Cross-platform / paths with spaces: clean — only join() / existsSync / atomicWriteJson; filenames are harness ids; no shell.
• Provider neutrality — two things it flagged, both fixed in be60a47:
  • The archived branch sat after the hookless and proxy-tier branches, so an archived target on those engines never reached it: the mail went to the terminal handoff (there is no terminal), nothing was filed, no log, no notice. The archived check now runs right after the assistant bounce — with no terminal the inbox is where the mail goes, whatever the engine.
  • The notice was deliver()ed straight into the sender's inbox, which a hookless / proxy-tier sender never drains. It now goes through routeMessage, so such a sender receives it the way it receives any mail (terminal handoff, or the god bounce when no renderer is there). requires_reply:false and the live-sender guard keep it from re-entering; hops are +1.
• Hot paths: clean — reuses reg, one O(1) lookup, extra I/O only on the archived path.
• Security / loop risk: clean — the notice cannot ping-pong (requires_reply:false, archived senders are never notified, a reply to system hits the existing no-inbox drop + bounce once); the subject echoes the sender's own text; the target id is a registry key.
• Hygiene — fixed: the redundant msg.from !== t guard (targets already exclude the sender).
• Flagged and deliberately not changed: if deliver() fails for an archived id the continue skips the base no-inbox bounce — theoretical, no flow deletes an agent dir while keeping its registry entry; harness senders that are not registry agents (scheduler, breaker, the literal 'god' used by the worker dispatch) get no notice — they cannot be mailing an archived agent in practice (the dispatch targets a worker that was just spawned).

Verified after the fix: typecheck clean, the test file 5/5 (new case: an archived custom-engine agent is filed and its sender told; a custom-engine sender is told through routing), local suite 839/839.

[gpechieu]

Housekeeping, no code change: I force-pushed this branch to reword the commit messages (an internal session trailer was dropped; Co-Authored-By stays) and replaced the evidence images with plain test-runner output, since the previous captures included local session data that should not have been published. The diff is byte-identical to what was reviewed (git diff between the old and new heads over src/test is empty); the review comments above cite the previous hashes. Sorry for the noise.