v0.23.1 — v0.23.1 — Goal Runtime Hardening

v0.23.1 — Goal Runtime Hardening

v0.23.0 shipped the Goal Runtime as a new architecture. Real production stress-tests on long LinkedIn networking goals (50+ subagent dispatches across 100+ minutes) surfaced a class of bugs that were invisible in unit tests because the affected code paths were dead in v0.23.0 — the budget cap never fired, the workspace was never isolated, secrets never got scrubbed in goal storage. This release wires them all up and adds the production-shaped tests that should have caught them.

Backwards compatible — no schema break beyond one additive migration (015_agent_runs_goal_id.sql). Goals submitted on v0.23.0 keep running; the new behaviours apply from the next claim onward.

Goal-runtime fixes

• Per-goal workspace at ~/.castor/workspace/goals/<goal_id>/. Each goal now runs in its own dir. The shared workspace is invisible to the orchestrator inside a goal context — no more 60-round shell-mining sweeps over leftover CSVs / screenshots from prior goals. Symmetric writer/validator path rewriting catches the orchestrator's habit of writing ~/.castor/workspace/foo.csv and routes it under the goal dir transparently.

• Budget cap (budget_usd) actually works. Migration 015 adds agent_runs.goal_id and rolls up costs via a LEFT JOIN. Before this commit, goals.cost_usd was dead storage (never written), so the orchestrator's per-round budget check read 0 forever. The Goals UI Cost column now displays real spend.

• Provider transient errors → paused (not failed). OpenRouter 402 / 429, upstream 5xx, etc. classify as transient. The goal goes to paused with a per-class backoff (402: 300s, 429: 60s, 5xx: 30s) so a topped-up account or expired rate-limit window lets the goal resume from the latest checkpoint — no work lost.

• Pause-with-backoff prevents reclaim thrash. Without this, the worker's 5s poll cycle would re-claim a 402-paused goal and immediately burn another 402, in a tight loop. The backoff repurposes lease_expires_at as a "don't reclaim before this time" marker (no schema change).

• ~-expansion bug in goal_validators. _resolve("~/.castor/workspace/foo.txt") was looking up <workspace>/~/.castor/workspace/foo.txt. Every regex/files check on a ~-prefixed path falsely failed with "file does not exist", which forced the acceptance gate to mark working goals as failed.

• Skipped subtasks no longer block the gate. A subtask marked status="skipped" (e.g. orchestrator hit a quota early) had its done_condition evaluated anyway. The gate now correctly bypasses skipped entries.

• Orchestrator anti-capitulation prompt rule. The "Knowing when you have ENOUGH" section in prompts/orchestrator.md used to say "20-30 leads is enough for an MVP." That cap applied to vague quantities only — but the orchestrator also obeyed it for user-specified numbers ("100 invites" → delivered 50). The rule is now scoped: explicit numeric targets in the user_input are LAW; scaling them down is labelled as capitulation, not engineering.

Security: secrets no longer leak through goal storage

Forensic inspection of a production goal showed plaintext credentials in three goal-runtime tables (goal_facts, goal_events, goal_checkpoints.messages_blob). The _scrub_secrets() regex set that memory.save() has used since v0.17.18 was never applied to these new v0.22 storage paths.

• Shared secret_scrub.py module. Patterns moved out of memory.py. scrub_text for free-form text, scrub_fact(key, value) adds a key-name heuristic — keys named password, api_key, access_token, private_key, session_cookie, etc. fully redact their value regardless of shape, catching plain string passwords that don't match any provider regex.

• Four goal storage paths now scrub on insert. db.fact_save, db.log_goal_event, db.save_checkpoint, and db.attach_goal_output all pass values through the appropriate scrub before write. save_checkpoint also walks tool_calls[].function.arguments so the orchestrator's habit of putting credentials in dispatch prompts gets caught.

• Natural-language credential phrasing. Added a second regex for "Fill in the password field (#password) with: hunter2" style prose — the dispatch-prompt pattern that exposed a LinkedIn password in production. Keeps innocent technical writing intact.

• Browser subagent now has direct vault access. Added secret_get / secret_list to the browser subagent's tool whitelist + a new Credential handling section in prompts/orchestrator.md. The orchestrator no longer needs to fetch credentials and ferry them across the trust boundary into dispatch prompts — the subagent fetches them locally and the raw value never enters orchestrator messages, events, or checkpoints.

Behaviour changes

• Worker daemon costs now roll up per goal. Old goals (created before migration 015) keep showing cost_usd: 0.0 since their agent_runs rows have no goal_id link. New goals get accurate per-goal cost tracking immediately.

• A paused goal with retry_after_sec set is invisible to claim_next_goal until the deadline elapses. Existing pause paths (worker shutdown, user pause) don't set the deadline, so they stay immediately reclaimable — same as before.

• mark_goal_paused(reason, retry_after_sec=N) is the new signature. Old callers (the keyword-only reason= form) keep working.

Migrations

015_agent_runs_goal_id.sql — adds goal_id TEXT column to agent_runs with a partial index. Backward-compatible (existing rows get NULL, treated as "non-goal run" by the budget rollup).

Tests

96 new tests across 4 new + several updated files. Full suite: 1345 passing, 24 skipped.

• test_goal_workspace_isolation.py (13) — per-goal workspace creation, path-rewrite invariants, cross-goal isolation.
• test_provider_error_classification.py (15) — 402/429/5xx classification, integration with goal_runner.run, backoff blocking immediate reclaim.
• test_secret_scrub_goals.py (25) — every goal storage path scrubs, including attach_goal_output and tool_calls.arguments.
• test_agent_runs.py (+5) — goal_id column persistence, get_goal_total_cost, get_goal / list_goals cost rollup contract.

Upgrading

git pull + restart the server (or castor-worker). The first goal_runner claim on the new code applies migration 015 automatically. No config changes required.

If you have goals paused or failed on v0.23.0 with APIStatusError 402 (OpenRouter out of credits) in the error field, you can manually convert them to paused to make them resumable:

UPDATE goals
SET status='paused', error=NULL, finished_at=NULL,
    worker_id=NULL, lease_expires_at=NULL
WHERE status='failed' AND error LIKE '%402%';