LANES: the swarm's width, and whether the width is working

[gHashTag]

Why

On 2026-09-17 the swarm reached 100% utilisation for the first time — and produced zero branches. Ten lanes were busy; every turn ended refused in zero seconds, because all five provider keys answered HTTP 429 (z.ai code 1302, "Rate limit reached"). A lane held by a refusal looks exactly like a lane doing work, so the headline number lied for the better part of an hour.

A fourteenth view, on the letter l.

What it shows

• Capacity, busy, free, utilisation — from /queen/status, which already sends workers (the QueenStatus interface simply never named the field; it does now).
• Is it work? — the last dispatch with its duration. A refusal under one second never reached the provider, and the card takes an alarm skin. That skin is earned, never decorative.
• The lane law — capacity = live keys × lanes per key. The worker ceiling is only a ceiling: it cannot conjure a lane a key does not pay for.
• Donate a lane / how XP is earned — XP accrues to the owner of the key a turn ran on, only for a turn that reached a branch. Never per dispatch: a refused turn holds a lane exactly like a working one, so paying per dispatch would pay best when the swarm is most broken.
• Where the work goes — a finished turn writes a branch inside a container that deliberately holds no push credential, so nothing reaches GitHub until something outside pushes it. GitButler is the intended safe path: virtual branches let the queue be published in slices instead of one irreversible flood.

What it refuses to do

No field accepts a provider key, and none ever will. This is a public static page; a secret typed into it is a secret published. The repository already asserts this in .env.example.queen ("a provider key must never appear here") and the view says it in both languages.

The contributor board, per-key health and the XP ledger need an endpoint that does not exist:

GET /queen/public-lanes → { keys: [{ owner, state: "live" | "cooldown" | "spent", lanes, turnsToBranch }] }

Following the contract stated at the top of queenHud.ts — "if a panel needs a number that is not derivable from these types, the number does not exist yet and the panel must say so rather than invent it" — those panels name what is missing instead of rendering a placeholder leaderboard.

Checks

tsc --noEmit	clean
qa/agents-spec-contract.mjs	PASS — Queen views 14, modules 14, keys 1234567890tprl
check:queen-languages	PASS (306 EN keys, 306 RU keys)
vite build	built in 1m 25s
check:queen-honesty	FAIL — pre-existing, verified failing identically on HEAD in a detached worktree; untouched here

Not visually verified: a dev server could not be started from this session, so the view is confirmed by typecheck, the tab contract and a production build, not by a screenshot.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code