Rig Lifecycle

Rig Lifecycle

The family of operations that create, start, stop, resume, restore, snapshot, release, unclaim, and destroy OpenRig-managed topologies. Includes the user story after reboot: "bring my work back without turning a clean recovery into a cleanup project."

If lifecycle is brittle, every higher-level primitive inherits that brittleness. Queue, workflow, seat continuity, cross-host operation, and RSI all assume that rigs and seats can be restored into known states.

Use this when

• Operating rig up / down / restore / resume / snapshot / release / unclaim / destroy
• Reading rig ps after a reboot or recovery and deciding what to trust
• Designing proof for a lifecycle scenario (clean start / warm resume / host reboot / provider auth loss / partial boot / operator recovery)
• Reasoning about restore-outcome semantics (resumed / rebuilt / fresh / failed / attention_required)
• Auditing whether a lifecycle proof is in-process bedrock vs requires real reboot evidence

Don't use this when

• The operation is single-command and deterministic — use openrig-user skill for CLI surface
• The work is operator-level configuration of OpenRig itself — use openrig-operator
• The work is rig spec authoring — use openrig-architect

Failure modes (4)

1. Auto-restore creates a partially restored rig that must be cleaned up before real recovery. Partial restore looks like recovery but isn't; cleanup-before-recovery becomes the actual workload.
2. rig ps or lifecycle projections report a healthier state than the runtime actually has. Projections are summaries; the runtime is truth. Don't trust projections silently.
3. Provider auth is unavailable after reboot and the system treats that as implementation work instead of a human/environment decision. Auth issues are environmental; route to human.
4. Resume succeeds for one runtime/provider but fails for another scenario that was never tested. Per-runtime parity assumptions break silently; matrix proof catches them.

Restore-honesty rule (load-bearing)

Failed resume is FAILED loudly. No automatic fresh fallback. Fresh launch is explicit follow-up only. This is enforced architecturally at the daemon level (per docs/as-built/architecture/architecture-rules-and-event-system.md rule 15).

The locked restore-outcome vocabulary:

| Outcome | Meaning | |---|---| | resumed | Native runtime resumed the same conversation | | rebuilt | New process assembled from artifacts (session_source: mode: rebuild) | | fresh | New process with no prior continuity | | failed | Restore attempted and failed; no automatic fallback | | attention_required | Recoverable blocker (provider auth refused, etc.); needs operator action | | n-a | Not applicable (terminal nodes, etc.) |

Codex auth-refusal returns attention_required (recoverable); Claude looksLikeClaudeLoginPrompt returns failed/login_required (terminal). Cross-runtime alignment is an open follow-up question.

Proof standard

Lifecycle proof should include real reboot or VM-reboot evidence, not only daemon-unit evidence. The minimum useful matrix covers:

| Scenario | What it proves | |---|---| | Clean start | Boot from spec into known state | | Warm resume | rig down → rig up resumes seats | | Host reboot / tmux socket absence | Recovery from lost tmux connection | | Provider auth loss | Codex/Claude auth refusal handled honestly | | Partial boot / partial failure | Some seats up, some failed; honest reporting | | Intentional operator recovery | Operator-initiated restore from snapshot |

Tier 1: in-process bedrock (daemon-unit evidence). Tier 2: real reboot or disposable Tart VM. Tier 1 alone is not lifecycle proof; it's bedrock.

Default policy is part of the primitive

Treat default policy as part of the primitive, not an afterthought. Lifecycle defaults that are too optimistic for the reliability level actually proven create silent harm:

• auto-restore defaults that mask failure modes
• Implicit fresh-fallback that hides resume failure
• Permissive verification that doesn't distinguish honest success from "appeared to work"

Total-Host Restore Product Rail v2

The rail sequences restore truth into four rungs:

• fully_restored is a Rung 3 execution rollup
• "fully back" is reserved for Rung 4 only

Naming discipline matters. "Fully restored" and "fully back" are different claims; don't conflate.

See also

• openrig-user skill — CLI surface for rig up / down / restore / etc.
• openrig-operator skill — operator-level discipline for OpenRig itself
• seat-continuity-and-handover skill — occupant-creation modes for restore (resume / rebuild / fresh / failed)
• openrig/docs/as-built/architecture/lifecycle-snapshot-restore.md (product reference doc) — daemon enforcement of restore-honesty rule

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: mvschwarz
• Source: mvschwarz/openrig
• License: Apache-2.0
• Homepage: https://openrig.dev

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.