[liuedcson]

Problem

phase(title) is a milestone label, but the workflow VM dropped every argument after the title. A script that wrapped its agent calls in a callback, as in phase("Review", async () => { await agent(...) }), ran zero agents. The workflow still finished with status: "completed" and an empty value. The tool description listed phase() alongside the execution primitives and never gave its signature, so the model reasonably wrote it that way.

Changes

• New features/workflow/script-lint.ts adds a lexical pre-run check, called at the end of resolveWorkflowScript. It rejects any phase(...) call with more than one argument and names the line, for example Workflow script line 2: phase(title) takes one string .... It covers inline, scriptPath, and saved scripts, and it runs before a journal or child process exists.
  • The scanner skips comments, strings, and templates.
  • It ignores obj.phase(...), function phase(...), and method definitions.
  • It accepts a trailing comma after a single argument.
• The VM's phase global throws the same message when it receives more than one argument. This catches calls the static check cannot see, such as const p = phase; p("x", fn).
• A run that completes with agentCalls === 0 gets a warning line at the top of its tool result. This is a warning, not an error: a log()-only script is still valid.
• Prompt text:
  • The workflow tool description now lists agent(), parallel(), pipeline(), and iterate() as the execution primitives, and states that phase(title) takes one string and runs nothing.
  • The system prompt's workflow bullet adds the same parenthetical.
• docs/orchestration-lifecycle.md documents the check, the runtime guard, and the warning.

Behavior and compatibility

• The phase signature and DSL semantics are unchanged: phase(title): void. Scripts that already used it correctly are unaffected.
• Scripts that passed a second argument to phase() now fail instead of running nothing. Previously they never did any work.
• The workflow tool description and one system-prompt line change. Every session where the workflow tool is registered receives this text.

Validation

• pnpm run check: passed.
• From packages/coding-agent: pnpm exec vitest --run test/workflow-*.test.ts test/step-system-prompt.test.ts: 8 files and 184 tests passed.
• New tests:
  • misuse detection and lookalikes that must not be flagged (test/workflow-script-lint.test.ts)
  • the VM guard
  • inline and scriptPath rejection with line numbers
  • the zero-agent warning, present only on completed runs

Limitations

• The static check is lexical, not a parser. Aliased calls are caught only at run time by the VM guard.
• ./test.sh was not used as evidence. On the author's machine it fails in unrelated git-dependent suites that also fail on main.