The queue drains itself now, and the morning note fits in a minute

One directory is the task manager my agents share was the most-read thing I have published, and it left out the part that matters most: who works the queue. For the first month the honest answer was mostly me. The nightly run drained a few entries, and every mechanical finding, a drifted git hook, a dependency advisory, a stale path, still waited for me to notice it and route it. I counted one day's commits: 68 across eight repos, about 48 of them the fleet maintaining itself with me as the router. The queue routed work. Nothing routed time. So the fleet maintains itself now, in four moves. Detection files its own work. Every night the deterministic lenses sweep every repo and file an allowlisted set of finding classes straight into the queue, through the same atomic door a session uses. The allowlist is the whole design: a stale gate, a test that runs only in CI, a dead path, a tool behind its pack. Judgment classes stay out. A file over budget is an editorial call, a missing contract gets authored, anything the sweep marks as risk is a ruling. A wrong work order costs more than a report line. Progress is measured on the contract, never on commits. The first version of the night loop counted a round as productive when the child committed. The benchmark night showed why that is the wrong delta: eleven of fifteen spawns committed, six of them the same appended paragraph, while the entry each was spawned for never moved. A round is fruitless per entry now: workable at child start, still pending and workable at child exit. An entry that takes fruitless rounds on three distinct nights is parked as needing me, with a note, through the door's own verb. A lease a dead child left behind is reaped at the start of the next run. The night converges on queue state instead of spinning on it. night 1 pending ──child──▶ pending fruitless: 1 night 2 pending ──child──▶ pending fruitless: 2 night 3 pending ──child──▶ pending fruitless: 3 ──▶ needs: owner one line in the brief, one ba