Orchestration State Machine ↗

Editorial Notes

The orchestration state machine is the heart of Symphony’s design. Issues transition through Unclaimed, Claimed (running or retry-queued), and Released states, with the orchestrator maintaining an in-memory authority for all running issues. The key insight is the reconciliation loop: on each poll tick, Symphony fetches current tracker state for claimed issues and stops runs if issues become ineligible (e.g., moved to a terminal state by a human). This prevents agents from working on stale or cancelled issues — a problem that simpler orchestrators ignore. Study this alongside the retry semantics (exponential backoff up to max_retry_backoff_ms) to understand how Symphony handles the reality that agent runs frequently fail.