7. Continue a finished tan

Parked is not idle

Normal completion of the initial /tan job sets the agent to parked, disposes the live session, and detaches it.

This is separate from the job’s completed, failed, or cancelled state. A parked tan can have encountered an error. A completed job is not proof the assignment succeeded.

Worked scenario: ask a finished tan one more question

The label audit has finished and its row is parked.

1. Discover the exact Tan ID again.
2. Open the runtime Hub.
3. Select that parked row.
4. Press Enter.
5. Wait for successful focus on that exact ID.
6. Submit a new, scoped prompt.

Plain-language message — verified tan chat:

Continue the Lantern Library tangent only. Main owns all other work. Read the current data/catalog.csv again and report how many green-shelf books it contains. Do not edit files or resume Main's earlier checklist.

Fictional acceptance check: the unchanged fixture contains two green-shelf books.

Expected lifecycle observation: successful revival attaches a new live session to the same Tan identity and retained transcript. After this prompt, it can become idle.

The old background job remains settled or may already have expired. This prompt does not recreate that job, and its answer is not promised to flow through the old job’s automatic delivery. Read the Tan conversation or have Main retrieve the answer.

Revival is not task resubmission

• r attempts to make a parked session live while leaving you in the Hub.
• Enter attempts revival as needed and then focuses its chat.
• A new prompt asks it to do work.
• A Hub send can combine revival with delivery of a new message.

None of these means “rerun the original /tan command automatically.”

When revival fails

Common boundaries include:

• No usable transcript file.
• No saved session-initialization contract.
• The recorded working directory is gone.
• No persisted reviver installed by the host.
• Unavailable model/authentication or rebuilt tool dependencies.
• The agent was killed, removed, or replaced during revival.

A failed cold revival is not necessarily sticky: the lifecycle manager drops a failed cold adoption so a later attempt can rebuild from fresher context.

Recovery

1. Read and preserve the exact error.
2. Inspect history without reviving, if available.
3. Repair the actual dependency through Main.
4. Rediscover and retry only after that repair.
5. If the agent is transcript-only or terminal, start a new bounded tangent from a reviewed summary instead of pretending the old agent resumed.

Do not delete a tombstone to force a killed agent back into service.

Optional detail: cold revival has new boundaries

The initial tan writes a saved contract containing its system prompt, work text, and enabled tool names. It does not record a complete live runtime.

The cold-revive path:

• Reopens the transcript.
• Rebuilds settings from the host’s current base settings, with subagent overrides.
• Resolves models through the SDK’s restoration and availability logic.
• Rebuilds tools and clamps the enabled set to available saved names.
• Uses current host resources for parts of initialization.
• Denies respawning when no saved spawn policy exists; the initial tan contract does not record one.

The recorded working directory is checked and used when reopening the transcript, while current Main context is also supplied for SDK discovery and shared artifacts. After a Main move or session transition, inspect paths and resource mappings rather than assuming perfect reconstruction.

The initial tan’s special fork reminder and compaction subscription are also not a permanently serialized control package. The original controller installs that subscription for its background run and removes it afterward; the generic cold reviver does not reinstall the Tan-specific subscription.

Practical consequence: after revival, restate the tangent’s scope, file ownership, and current inputs. Check the effective model and tools when they matter. Do not interpret successful revival as proof of an identical model, settings snapshot, cache lineage, or environment.