Troubleshooting

The failures that happen often enough to have an answer. Each one starts on the ticket’s Activity tab, which says what the run did and how it ended.

An agent says it is not signed in

Sign-in lives outside the app: every CLI owns a browser login that does not survive being driven from another process. Open Settings → Agents, press the help button on that row, run the command it shows in Terminal, then Check again. Herdloom marks a sign-in failure as not retryable, so the run did not burn its attempts; retry the ticket from the drawer once the row turns green.

A run stops with a usage limit

The CLI answered with its subscription’s limit before doing any work. The ticket parks in Needs you with the limit quoted, and the attempt is not counted against the project’s retries. Wait for the limit to reset, or open the drawer and hand the ticket to a different agent, then run it again.

A run stalls

No output for five minutes ends the run and parks the ticket. The usual cause is a command waiting for input that will never come. Read the last lines on the Activity tab: if the agent was mid-edit, retry and it starts fresh with the plan and the history of what failed. If it was stuck on a command, that command probably needs a non-interactive flag in the repository.

Verification keeps failing

Verification is two things: commits must exist on the branch, and the project’s test command must pass. Check Verification in project settings and run that command yourself in the main checkout. A suite that needs a database or a second service will fail in a worktree, because those are not started for you. If the tests are fine and the agent still cannot satisfy them, the plan was wrong rather than the code: use Plan again, not another retry. A circuit breaker parks the ticket early when two attempts change nothing.

A ticket parks with a conflict

A conflict holds until the other ticket has landed, not merely until it is reviewed, because two branches cut from the same base still collide at merge time. Land the partner ticket and the held one starts. For a pull request GitHub reports as conflicting, Update branch in the drawer merges the base in, through an agent if it has to, and pushes. A chain of old branches all touching one file needs one round per neighbour that lands. When one agent pass cannot resolve it, the fallbacks are a release bundle or a merge by hand.

A pull request cannot be merged

The Merge button says what stands in the way rather than failing: a required review, checks that are failing or still running, a draft, a conflict. An administrator gets a separate Merge as admin where the ruleset allows bypass. Merge also refuses while a run is still active on the ticket.

A checkout is missing

It was reclaimed, which is normal: checkouts are parked once a ticket is done, sent back to Backlog, or sitting in In PR with a quiet branch. The branch is the durable thing. The diff, the pull request and a release all work from the repository, and the Review tab restores the checkout in one click when you want to run the app in it.

The board looks stale

A ticket imported from a tracker does not change when the issue changes: watches add tickets, they do not update them. Refresh in the drawer re-fetches one ticket. Triage results go stale the same way when you edit a ticket, so run triage again after a round of edits.

If nothing is moving at all, check three things: the agent is switched on in Settings → Agents, the project’s Queued limit is not already full, and the waiting tickets’ dependencies are actually Done. Autopilot never pulls from Backlog, so a card moved back there stays there on purpose.

Next

Feedback builds the report file to attach when none of this fits. Needs you explains the column these failures land in.