[Catalog] Owner decision: retire the named duplicate/dogfood instances (successor to #67)

[serge-ivo]

Successor to #67, carrying the one thing that issue could not close: a data decision on the owner's own account. Filed so closing #67 does not drop it.

#67's fourth audit recommended exactly this — "Rewrite the body or close it in favour of a narrower successor" — on the grounds that its acceptance criterion "no duplicate dogfood instances remain" was ticked on 2026-08-06 and falsified within hours, twice more since. A criterion a single mis-typed path can falsify is not a criterion.

Why this is not a dev task

#67's final comment (2026-08-23) states it plainly: "No code is needed and none should be written for it." Every mechanism is built. What is left is choosing which of the owner's own live rows to retire.

What is already done (no action needed)

13 commodity/vaporware agents drafted	2026-08-06, under #64 — public catalogue 29 → 13
bulk-visibility bypassing the publish guard	closed, cec87d8a
my/instances returning cancelled rows (so /cancel cancelled nothing visible)	closed, cec87d8a — this was how the clutter accumulated
A repo whose path is unusable now offers the fix instead of naming it	aeddb214 — the mechanism that produced the duplicates
A non-destructive way to retire an instance	4f1a8826 (#825) — see below

Pause changes the decision this issue asks for

When every audit on #67 was written, the only lifecycle control was cancel: unsubscribe, retire the shared subscription row, irreversible. That is why five separate audits deferred — several candidates hold content nobody wanted to destroy on an agent's say-so.

#825 added pause/resume. A duplicate can now be switched off — no new runs, no cron, no pump deliveries, no webhooks — while keeping its subscription, documents, memory, timeline and history. For most of the candidates below, pause is probably the right call rather than cancel, and it is reversible if it is not.

The named candidates (from #67's audits, last re-measured 2026-08-18)

Instance	id	Evidence	Suggested
Codex MCP Browser Test	7867ed7e	last activity 2026-06-11; content is the smoke test's own persistence marker	cancel
Google Drive Doc Chat Test	3d51aceb	last activity 2026-07-13; content is a smoke-test fact; holds no Drive grant	cancel
ProAgentStore MCP client	a9ee6079	3 msgs, 1 call all-time, its single mcp_list_tools failed; sibling MCP client dfc1cf92 is the live one	cancel
Terminal Operator	da39100b	3 msgs, all within one minute on 2026-08-05; agent already drafted	cancel or pause
iTerm2 Operator	8d21ea1a	same	cancel or pause
kitty Operator	59cc5144	same	cancel or pause
Chess coder	bfc76603	1m51s working life, superseded 3m40s later by Chess coder 2; never ran a coding session; its repo row still points at a path that does not exist	cancel

Two things that must NOT be touched

• Creator OS b619b3da — do not cancel. It holds 8 hand-authored knowledge documents, 26 chunks, 8,681 chars (an operating manual: tone rules, caption rules, rate-limit policy, a tool-failure honesty rule). [Catalog] Collapse duplicate + dogfood agents and instances #67's third audit flagged that this content exists nowhere else. Worth exporting regardless — export_agent now does that in one call.
• The meeting-notes subscriber is a DIFFERENT account. agent_analytics reports subscribers: 1 and that instance is not among the owner's. Every audit left it untouched deliberately; identifying it needs /v1/admin/*. It should stay untouched until the owner says who it is.

Not duplicates — leave alone

The eleven named coder-repo instances ("FAS FreeAppStore Coder", "PWS ProWebStore Platform Coder", …) are one-workspace-per-repository, which is that agent's intended shape. Multiple instances of one agent is a supported feature (routes/instances.ts:118-120), not drift.

Acceptance

• Each of the seven above is paused, cancelled, or explicitly kept — recorded here.
• Creator OS's 8 documents exported before anything else is decided.
• The meeting-notes cross-account subscription is identified, or explicitly left.

No code. Closing this is a matter of the owner running the decisions and noting them.