Question: completed Codex worker later marked stuck during lifecycle detection

[NichUK]

Question

Should a Codex worker session that has already reported agentReportedState: "completed" be treated as terminal/success before later process lifecycle probes can mark it stuck?

Context

We are testing AO with the Codex agent plugin on Windows using the local process runtime:

• @aoagents/ao: 0.9.2
• @aoagents/ao-plugin-agent-codex: 0.9.1
• Windows PowerShell
• Project agent configured as codex
• Worker launched after locally patching agent-codex to use codex exec for prompt-driven non-interactive work

This is separate from the agent-codex launch-command issue in #2078 / #2079.

Observed behavior

After the local codex exec patch, AO spawned session atp-2 and the Codex worker successfully performed the requested smoke task:

• created ao-smoke-result.txt containing AO_SMOKE_OK
• ran the project tests successfully
• created branch feat/ao-smoke-atp-2

The session JSON contained completion evidence:

{
  "agentReportedState": "completed",
  "agentReportedAt": "2026-06-01T11:23:06.685Z",
  "codexThreadId": "019e82eb-3170-7891-bec0-2291b84ebe5e"
}

However, before manual cleanup, ao session ls --json later reported the session as stuck. The lifecycle evidence looked like:

reason: probe_failure
runtime state: exited
signal_disagreement runtime=alive process=dead activity_signal=valid via_native activity=exited

Attempting to report completion externally after that was rejected because the runtime had already exited:

Report rejected: runtime is not alive

Expected / question

For prompt-only local work where the worker has reported completed, should AO promote that session to a terminal completed state before runtime exit probes can escalate it to stuck?

Or is the current behavior expected because AO requires some other completion path, artifact, PR state, or runtime shutdown protocol in addition to agentReportedState: "completed"?

If this is expected behavior, guidance on the intended lifecycle contract for short-lived headless agents would be very helpful.