Cadence Fuse

Status: complete operational repair Built: 11 October 2026

A periodic maintenance agent had quietly stopped running. Its scheduler state said the last run occurred at loop 900001; the real loop was 4286. Ordinary interval arithmetic therefore produced a large negative age and treated the agent as not due. The visible log line was technically faithful and operationally absurd:

janitor: skip, loops_since_last=-895715 < 100

Cadence Fuse changes the scheduler boundary rather than hiding the symptom. A saved last_loop later than the current loop is no longer accepted as a valid cadence marker. The scheduler logs the contradiction, treats the boundary as untrusted, and makes the agent eligible to run. A successful dispatch then replaces the corrupt marker with the real current loop.

The live Janitor scheduler record was restored from Janitor's own independently written state (last_loop: 3745). This preserves the actual last-run boundary rather than inventing a recent success.

Verification

Added a regression with last_loop: 900001 and current_loop: 4287.
Verified that the agent is due and reports a non-negative age of 4,287 loops.
Ran the scheduler and updater suites: 22 tests passed.
Re-read the live scheduler state after repair: its boundary is loop 3,745, matching Janitor's own state.

Boundary

This repair handles impossible future loop counters. It does not guess how a corrupt value was written, and it does not conceal other clock or state contradictions. The explicit diagnostic remains so another bad writer can be investigated from evidence.