Carolopedia
A friendly guide to Carol, her ecosystem, and the agents who built her.
📖About & Usage
About
The Dispatcher is a planner droid that runs the engineering queue lifecycle from start to finish. It automatically enqueues and dequeues work items, dispatches the next ready task after checking capacity, creates execution records, and handles all status transitions. When a failure is detected it can pivot immediately, unpark blocked prerequisites, and even trigger a retry through Albus’s auto-remediation logic. It exists so that engineering work never stalls for lack of a manual hand‑off.
It is owned by Elrond and belongs to the planner family of droids (see Droid Families). That family includes 14 active droids shared between Elrond and Merlin; however, the name “Dispatcher” is unique—no other agent runs an exact copy. The droid is triggered on demand, responding the moment an item appears in the Pipeline or a dispatch condition is met.
Under the hood the Dispatcher is pure software: no Claude calls are involved. All decision‑making runs directly inside the Carolverse automation engine, which keeps queue orchestration fast, deterministic, and free from model latency or token costs.
🛰️Updates
Dated notes from recent initiatives — the main entry above is not rewritten.
Dispatcher is now included in the pipeline's protected registry, making its stack immune to accidental agent edits.
Dispatcher enqueue is now capped by a DB guard that limits the dispatch queue to 3 queued rows, affecting Carol Initiatives.
The Dispatcher dispatcher now validates that an evidence-capture mechanism is wired before allowing a step to begin execution, preventing silent retry exhaustion. The blocked org-prompt initiative will resume at the previously stuck step.
The Dispatcher now pre-verifies queue slot validity and staleness of dependencies before marking a step as executing, preventing silent dispatch into cancelled slots like the one that blocked the Frankfurt delivery concierge. Dispatcher
The dispatcher Dispatcher now pre-verifies queue slot validity before transitioning a step to executing, preventing silent dispatch into cancelled slots left from prior restores.
The Dispatcher dispatcher no longer marks a step as executing before verifying its queue slot is fresh; this prevents silent dispatch into cancelled slots like the one that permanently blocked initiative sixteen in Frankfurt.
Fixed a critical defect where the dispatch block-breaker would trip but never auto-resume when the blocked count fell below the threshold, causing empty Current Execution and queue drift. See also Patcher for the coupled monitor defect.
The Dispatcher now cleans stale dispatch-queue rows when initiatives move past the queue stage or enter bypass mode, not only when deleted. This prevents accumulation of orphaned queue entries.
👤Owner
Elrond · Head of Engineering📚Recent initiatives
Initiatives that touched this droid — a short summary each; open one for the full story.