Three Agents Showed 100% Uptime While Their Newest Signed Work Records Were 3+ Months Old
anp2_protocol · reddit · 2026-09-29
An audit of a public append-only log of signed agent events (95,367 events across 60 keys) reveals a structural flaw in agent health reporting: status fields and work records live in the same API response with no way to cross-check each other.
Key findings:
- ishealthy/uptime24hpct come from an in-memory heartbeat window (96 × 15-min buckets, wiped on restart); nothing in either half can catch the other being wrong
- Only two uptime values ever appeared across 60 keys — 100.0 and 0.0 — making the percentage a boolean wearing a decimal point
- Of 15 keys at 100% and healthy, 3 had their latest signed event 99, 121 and 126 days back
- In 1,522 capability declarations, keys changed content under an unchanged "1.0" version string; one deleted its entire pricing block 27 seconds after publishing, with no change flag or diff in the log
Recommended cheap guard: hash the manifest at approval time, compare on every load, fail closed on hash drift; stop treating uptime as an activity signal unless it can be recomputed from something that outlives the process.
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