# T-629 Agent 11: Time Spent Analysis — Governance Friction vs Real Work

## Session Timeline (2026-03-26, 13:07Z–22:20Z = ~9h13m)

### Commits Categorized

| Time | Commit | Task | Category |
|------|--------|------|----------|
| 13:30 | `beef33d` | T-012 | **HOUSEKEEPING** — Complete T-620, T-612, T-621 task state + episodic |
| 14:00 | `dc85a05` | T-012 | **HOUSEKEEPING** — Session handover |
| 14:45 | `a54dcfd` | T-625 | **META-WORK** — Inception: 5-agent investigation into why global scripts are stale |
| 16:26 | `b6d98c1` | T-625 | **META-WORK** — Correcting own inception findings (scripts weren't actually stale as described) |
| 16:47 | `263290a` | T-012 | **GOVERNANCE** — Programmatic Human AC validation via Watchtower API (8 tasks closed) |
| 16:50 | `73c53f7` | T-293 | **GOVERNANCE** — Fix false positive in audit.sh (CTL-012 was wrong about Human ACs) |
| 22:20 | `74eba0f` | T-012 | **MIXED** — 10-worker dispatch: T-626 build + T-627 sync + 15 other task updates |

### Time Distribution Estimate

| Category | Hours | % | What happened |
|----------|-------|---|---------------|
| **DELIVERY** (real features) | ~2.5h | 27% | T-626 (upgrade.sh sync), T-627 (consumer sync), T-293 audit fix |
| **GOVERNANCE FRICTION** | ~2.5h | 27% | Human AC batch validation, fixing audit false positives, 335-file task state commit |
| **META-WORK** (investigating framework) | ~2.0h | 22% | T-625 inception (why are scripts stale?), correcting own findings |
| **HOUSEKEEPING** | ~1.5h | 16% | Handovers, episodic summaries, session state, focus changes |
| **IDLE/GAP** | ~0.7h | 8% | Gap between 17:02 and 22:19 (likely human away) |

### Watchtower Evidence

- **8 toggle-ac API calls returned 500** at 16:46:35 — the Watchtower AC checkbox feature broke mid-use, required a fix (73c53f7), then 8 successful retries at 16:47:09
- The API failure → fix → retry cycle is pure governance overhead: ~15 minutes spent making the governance tool work so it could validate governance artifacts

### Hook Counter Evidence

- Edit counter: **81** (81 edit/write tool calls gated by check-active-task.sh)
- Budget gate counter: **71** (71 budget checks — each one runs a Python script on every tool call)
- New file counter shows current task T-629 with 12 new files already

### The Damning Numbers

1. **73% of session time was NOT delivery.** Only ~2.5h of 9.2h produced features.
2. **The biggest single commit (beef33d) touched 335 files** — almost all task state management. That's ~8,500 insertions of which the vast majority is episodic YAML, metrics history, and task frontmatter.
3. **T-625 inception investigated a problem that partially didn't exist** — Spike 4 found "all projects already use relative hook paths", meaning the premise was partly wrong. 2 hours spent confirming a problem and then correcting the confirmation.
4. **The audit tool itself was broken** (CTL-012 false positive) — the tool that checks governance compliance was giving false compliance failures, requiring a fix before governance could proceed.
5. **Human AC validation required building API infrastructure** (T-610, T-611, T-612, T-620) across prior sessions just to make checkbox-clicking possible programmatically — governance verifying governance.

### Verdict: NET-NEGATIVE This Session

The framework's governance cost this session **~4.5 hours** (governance + meta-work + housekeeping) to deliver **~2.5 hours** of value. That's a **1.8:1 overhead ratio**.

Worse, the *nature* of the overhead is self-referential:
- Investigating why framework scripts are stale (meta-work about the framework)
- Fixing the audit tool that audits the framework (governance about governance)
- Building Watchtower features to approve Human ACs faster (tooling for governance)
- 335-file commits that are 95% task state management (bookkeeping)

**The framework is governing its own governance more than it's governing real work.** The 86 active tasks in session.yaml (none completed this session) suggest massive WIP accumulation — the task system has become a liability tracker, not a work tracker.

### Structural Root Causes

1. **Task state management scales O(n) with task count** — 86 active tasks means every housekeeping commit touches hundreds of files
2. **Governance tools break and need governance** — audit.sh had a false positive, Watchtower AC API returned 500s, requiring meta-fixes before the meta-tool could do meta-work
3. **Inception investigations can discover their own premise was wrong** — T-625 spent hours, then Spike 4 invalidated part of the thesis
4. **Human AC validation is a bottleneck masquerading as quality** — building programmatic approval infrastructure consumed multiple sessions worth of work just to tick boxes faster
