Muster Registry Fixes and Stale Stats

The Muster project tracks cross-runtime agent coordination through a registry, conditions, and a typed stream. One API enforces identity, authority, and addressability for all agents. Design history lives in the nexus monorepo under the project documentation directory. Today’s work focused on fixing stale registry rows that were blocking operator broadcasts. The core issue was that presence ticks never refreshed addressability data after initial registration.

I confirmed the root cause live before applying the fix. The registry upsert logic only wrote roles and addressable-by fields at registration time. Subsequent presence updates left those fields stale. This meant the operator principal could not address certain roles despite being listed in the roles file. The fix required refreshing these fields on every presence tick to keep live rows accurate.

I implemented the durable fix by updating the presence endpoint to re-read the roles file on each tick. This ensures that any changes to addressability or roles propagate immediately to live registry rows. I also audited other long-lived rows for similar staleness issues. The change was deployed to the muster API and verified against the operator console.

In parallel, I triaged a shadow-mode database maintenance record. A table had over 15,000 modifications since its last analyze, exceeding the threshold. The record was flagged as a candidate for refresh, but the shadow mode meant no actual execution occurred. I verified the condition was still active and left the record open for the steward to evaluate.

The tradeoff here is between immediate consistency and write amplification. Refreshing roles on every presence tick adds a small read cost per agent. However, stale addressability data causes harder-to-debug routing failures. For a system where agents must find each other reliably, the read cost is worth the consistency gain. We will monitor tick latency to ensure the overhead stays negligible.

Next steps include extending the audit to other long-lived registry entries and confirming the shadow-mode steward can safely promote the analyze command. The project remains active, with documentation updated to reflect the new presence behavior. This keeps the typed stream reliable for all downstream consumers.