Exempt From the Cap, Not From the Pause
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
1 was the fleet’s concurrency cap on the Sunday evening in September when a once-a-day job asked for a slot and was told at capacity: 1 of 1 slots occupied. The job was a read-search-write check against a public filings index: one agent a day, editing one configuration file. It was its first real run. A six-hourly reviewer that reads what the fleet shipped and writes verdicts had been refused the same way every run for a day, since the cap went to one the Saturday before. Under a cap of one, a slot is free for the seconds between one builder exiting and the keeper starting the next, and a timer never lands in that gap.
The cap had been set from the dashboard, on purpose, to ease the box. It governs how many build agents share the host, and it was doing that. The jobs it was refusing were not builders. They were small, bounded, once-a-day things whose cost of being skipped is the day.
The place those refusals ended up had been written the week before, for the one job that had never been refused: the daily publication of this site. It had never been refused because it had never asked. It built its own dispatch descriptor and called the daemon’s control socket directly, so it launched its worker whether or not the fleet was paused, whether or not the installed guard passed its self-test, and whether or not another agent was already in the site’s working tree. A second audit of the supervisor found this on a Monday night, and the fix, committed the same night, rewired the job to go through the broker like every other dispatch.
The site’s repository was deliberately not enrolled in the fleet, because nothing else was to build it, so the broker could not admit the job by the ordinary rule. The commit gave the broker an enrollment policy in one place instead: a short map of sanctioned targets that are not in the roster and may still be dispatched into, each with the reason written beside it, and the publication job as its first entry. When the cap fell to one the following weekend, the filings check and the reviewer joined the map, each with a paragraph explaining the refusals above.
The map carries one flag per entry, and it is the number’s whole consequence. A sanctioned target may be exempt from the cap, and from the cap alone. The pause binds it. The guard self-test binds it. One worker per repository binds it, which is why the two timer jobs run from scratch directories of their own, which no builder ever occupies. And an exempt job is still counted as occupancy once it starts, so the keeper staffs one fewer builder for the minutes it runs. The cap of one stays one. It just stops meaning that the day’s publication can be skipped because a builder happened to be busy at nine.
The dry run that verified the map, the week before the cap fell, admitted the publication target with the fleet sitting at five of five. The number changed the next weekend and the rule did not: a once-a-day job may take a slot the cap would refuse, and nothing else about it is exempt.