Closed-Loop DONE for Autonomous Agent CI/CD: Why 'PR Opened' Is Not Shipped

A backlog item flips to status='completed' in the database. The dashboard ticks up. The agent posts “PR ready for review” and walks away. Three hours later, a different agent notices the fleet is running yesterday’s binary. The PR was never reviewed. CI was red on main. No image got built. Nothing actually shipped.

This is the closed-loop problem. When an autonomous agent declares work complete, what does “complete” mean? In most agent fleets, it means the agent called the last tool in its own workflow — typically open_pr or its equivalent. That is not the same as “the change is live for users”, and the gap between the two is where state-of-record systematically lies.