Watchers

Watcher work is long-running observation and triage: CI, deploy, release, smoke, environment recovery, visual regression, or drift monitoring. GPUaaS showed that monitoring is real work and needs an owner, success condition, failure condition, escalation rule, and evidence.

Watcher lanes are not new roles. They are modes attached to existing roles, such as ops/watch, ui/watch, or backend/watch.

Commands

fairway packet watcher <watch-id> --owner <role-or-lane> --process <text> --command <cmd> --success <text> --failure <text>
fairway watcher start <watch-id> --task <task-id>
fairway watcher finish <watch-id> --result <pass|fail|blocked> [--artifact <path-or-url>] [--duration-seconds <n>] [--notes <text>]
fairway watcher status [--include-done]

packet watcher prints a bounded watch brief. start and finish record normal fairway evidence and checkpoint rows; they do not run the watched command unless a future runner adapter is configured.

Packet Shape

watch_id:
owner_lane:
process:
command:
expected_duration:
poll_interval:
success_condition:
failure_condition:
allowed_fixes:
must_not_touch:
escalation_rules:
evidence_required:
handoff_format:

Authority Boundary

A watcher may:

• poll or subscribe to external job status,
• collect logs and traces,
• classify failures,
• record typed evidence,
• make a narrow pre-authorized fix,
• escalate when scope expands.

A watcher must not:

• silently expand into unrelated implementation work,
• change a deployment target outside the packet,
• retry indefinitely without a new hypothesis,
• mark work done without evidence,
• bypass review, merge, release, or environment-touch rules.

Evidence Types

Recommended artifact_type values for watcher evidence:

• ci_pipeline,
• deploy_validation,
• command_log,
• screenshot,
• browser_trace,
• trace,
• runbook,
• config,
• diff,
• other.

Failure Classification

Class	Default action
Expected transient	Retry within packet limits.
Known flaky lane	Rerun once, then create or link a task if repeated.
Owning-layer defect	Make a narrow fix only if allowed by the packet.
Environment blocker	Mark blocked with reason and evidence.
Scope expansion	Return to coordinator with a blocker or handoff.

Dashboard

The dashboard should show active watchers separately from implementation tasks:

• watcher id,
• owner lane,
• process,
• elapsed time,
• success/failure condition,
• latest evidence,
• stale flag when no checkpoint/evidence appears within the expected interval.