The wave-guard was killed after its 11:13 renewal and never wrote logs/WAVE5-DONE, despite the worker succeeding at 11:21. That makes this file's own first-command heuristic actively misleading — "no sentinel + no processes -> workers were KILLED" would have thrown away a completed, verified wave. Recorded the reliable signals instead: the size of logs/<name>.json and the tail of logs/<name>.state. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>