Workspace with no git remote can never pass the shipped-work gate; needle doctor passes 17/17

[brianhendry]

Summary

verify_shipped_work requires the closing commit to have been pushed upstream. A workspace created with plain git init has no upstream, so the gate returns Fail on every closure regardless of the work produced. needle doctor reports no problem.

Environment: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS (WSL2, Windows 11), x86_64 · needle 0.6.0 · bead 0.2.4 · Claude Code 2.1.197

Mechanism

// src/validation/shipped_work.rs:244
let pushed = git_output(workspace, &["merge-base", "--is-ancestor", &head, "@{u}"]).await.is_ok();

With no remote, @{u} does not resolve, the command fails, pushed is false, and the gate fails — independent of what the agent produced.

Reproduction

Workspace: git init, one commit, no remote. Bead: "Add a hello world Python script called hello.py".

The agent did the work correctly and committed three times across dispatches:

309d4f4 Add module-level docstring to hello.py
37e5b0a Add hello.py with main() function and entry point guard
615bcee Add hello world Python script

hello.py was present, correct, and ran. Every closure failed the gate, so the parent bead reopened and mitosis split it. One bead became seven in roughly seventy seconds:

ndl-84b879a2  Add a hello world Python script called hello.py     InProgress  rev 216
ndl-d02e0c6c  Create hello.py file with basic Python structure    Closed
ndl-1296492b  Add hello world print statement to hello.py         Closed
ndl-b3061487  Verify hello.py runs correctly and commit it        Closed
ndl-b88252df  Create hello.py file with basic structure           Open
ndl-bd5ab66f  Add print hello world statement to hello.py         Open
ndl-45a09339  Add main() function and entry point guard           Open

ndl-b3061487 — "Verify hello.py runs correctly and commit it" — was created and closed while the underlying condition remained unmet.

Adding a remote (gh repo create --source=. --push) resolved it immediately; the next run completed one bead cleanly and every run since has been clean.

Why this may warrant a code change rather than a docs note

• needle doctor passes 17/17 on a workspace where the gate cannot succeed. It verifies disk space, heartbeat directories, lock files and adapter template executables, but not whether the completion condition is satisfiable.
• The quickstart creates exactly such a workspace and does not mention a remote.
• The failure presents as the agent repeatedly failing rather than as a configuration problem, so it is slow to diagnose.
• Quarantine did not engage before mitosis multiplied the work, despite splice.claim_churn_threshold: 20.

Suggested

1. A doctor check: when worker.enforce_shipped_work is true and git rev-parse @{u} fails, report FAIL with the remedy (git remote add / git push -u). This would turn a silent dead end into an immediate, self-explanatory failure.
2. A more specific gate failure message naming the missing upstream, distinct from "no commit since dispatch".
3. A quickstart note stating that the workspace needs an upstream, or that worker.enforce_shipped_work: false is required for local-only repositories.

Happy to test a fix on WSL2 if that helps.