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agentic: 'canary' means two unrelated things — rename the AI-rollout pair before the release cadence lands #1119

Description

@rickylabs

Summary

agentic:provider-canary and agentic:rollout-canary are AI provider/model rollout canaries
— they canary a model change across lanes. They have nothing to do with release canaries,
which publish a pre-release package to JSR to smoke-test a cut.

Two unrelated concepts, one word, in the same deno task agentic:* namespace.

Why this is worth fixing now rather than later

It has been survivable so far because release canaries had no cadence and no tooling of their own
— there was nothing to collide with. The milestone/canary release system changes that: it
introduces canary trigger points, canary labels on issues and PRs, and canary steps inside a
milestone run. At that point an orchestrator reading agentic:provider-canary in a task list has
a genuine reason to believe it is the release canary command.

The cost of the collision lands on exactly the reader least equipped to catch it: a fresh
orchestrator agent, working from task names, mid-milestone.

Proposal

Rename the AI-rollout pair to say what they actually canary:

Today Proposed
agentic:provider-canary agentic:model-rollout-canary
agentic:rollout-canary agentic:model-rollout-verify (name to be settled against its real behaviour)

Reserve the bare word canary in the agentic: namespace for release canaries, matching
.agents/skills/netscript-release, which is where a reader will expect it.

Check before renaming: whether either task name appears in .llm/harness/, .agents/skills/,
CI workflows, or generated docs, and alias rather than break if any external reference exists.

Acceptance

  • The AI-rollout canary tasks are named so that "canary" alone does not read as a release
    canary
  • .llm/tools/agentic/README.md and the harness tooling index state which is which, in one
    line each
  • No remaining task, doc, or skill uses bare "canary" for AI rollout
  • Existing references updated or aliased; nothing silently breaks

Provenance

Raised by the 0.0.4 orchestrator while scoping the milestone/canary release system, and confirmed
during wave-four orchestration. Filed separately because it is a rename with its own blast radius
and should not be buried inside the release-system work.

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