11-manager-child-dotfile-hitl

11 - Manager + Child Dotfile with a Human Gate

A multi-file example -- and a regression fixture: a parent pipeline whose manager node (a house-shaped supervisor) runs a separate child pipeline that contains a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approval gate. Its purpose is to prove the interviewer driving a gate is wired all the way through -- from the top-level run, through the manager, into the child pipeline's gate.

Known issue -- does not run walk-up today. Driven via standalone attractor run ... --on-human-gate auto-approve, this pipeline fails: the child pipeline's HumanGateHandler does not receive an interviewer through the manager, so the child fails immediately (Manager exhausted 1 cycle(s), last child status: fail). That is the exact failure mode this fixture exists to catch. It is normally driven by a test harness that wires the interviewer end-to-end. Root-causing the standalone-CLI path (real regression vs CLI-only gap) is tracked as a follow-up -- unlike the other numbered examples, this one is not a proven walk-up demo.

Unlike the single-file numbered tutorials, this one is a directory of two .dots:

File	Role
parent.dot	start -> manager (shape=house, stack.child_dotfile="child-with-gate.dot") -> done
child-with-gate.dot	start -> hitl_gate (shape=hexagon) -> approved / rejected -> done

The manager references the child by filename; stack.child_dotfile resolves relative to parent.dot's own directory, so the pair travels together.

What This Exercises

• shape=house manager node supervising a child pipeline via stack.child_dotfile (rather than inlining every stage in one graph).
• manager.max_cycles=1 / manager.actions=observe -- one deterministic pass, no steering, which is enough to prove the wiring.
• HITL gate in the child (shape=hexagon, type="wait.human"): edge labels become the choices -- [A] Approve -> approved, [R] Reject -> rejected.
• Interviewer threading: the interviewer must reach the child gate (HandlerRegistry -> ManagerLoopHandler -> child HandlerContext -> HumanGateHandler). This example is the regression fixture for that path.

Running it (currently fails -- see Known issue above)

The intended command, once the standalone path is fixed, is -- from the attractor repo root:

DOT="$PWD/examples/pipelines/11-manager-child-dotfile-hitl/parent.dot"
mkdir -p /tmp/attractor-demo && cd /tmp/attractor-demo
attractor run "$DOT" --cwd . --on-human-gate auto-approve

Today this exits status=fail -- the manager's child pipeline fails instantly because the gate never receives the interviewer (see Known issue above). The child resolves relative to parent.dot automatically; --on-human-gate auto-approve would take the gate's first option ([A] Approve). See ../README.md for why the $DOT capture + cd + --cwd . are needed.

Or run from a bundle / recipe

steps:
  - agent: attractor:pipeline-runner
    instruction: "Run the manager + child-dotfile HITL example"
    context:
      pipeline_path: "examples/pipelines/11-manager-child-dotfile-hitl/parent.dot"

DOT parser note

Attribute keys containing dots (manager.max_cycles, stack.child_dotfile) are written without surrounding double-quotes -- the attractor DOT parser stores a quoted key with its quote characters, which breaks the bare-string lookups the handlers use. Correct: manager.max_cycles=1. Wrong: "manager.max_cycles"="1".