Today, if `adapter.setup()` raises (most often: an LLM credential is
missing/rotated), main.py crashes before the agent-card route is mounted.
start.sh restart-loops, /.well-known/agent-card.json never returns 200,
and the workspace is invisible to the bench/canvas — operators see
"stuck booting forever" with no clear error to act on.
The agent-card is a static capability advertisement (name, version,
skills, supported protocols). It doesn't need a working LLM. Coupling
its mount to setup() conflates *availability* ("am I up?") with
*configuration* ("can I actually answer?"). They're different concerns.
This change:
- Builds AgentCard from `config.skills` (static names from config.yaml)
BEFORE adapter.setup(), so the route mounts independent of setup state.
- Wraps setup() + create_executor in try/except. On success, mounts
the real DefaultRequestHandler with rich loaded_skills metadata
swapped into the card in-place. On failure, mounts a JSON-RPC
handler that returns -32603 "agent not configured" with the
setup() exception in error.data.
- Heartbeat keeps running on misconfigured boots so the platform
marks the workspace as reachable-but-misconfigured rather than
crash-looping. Operators redeploy with corrected env without
chasing a restart loop.
- initial_prompt and idle_loop are skipped on misconfigured boots —
they self-fire to /, which would land in -32603 anyway, and the
marker would consume on the first useless attempt.
Bench impact (RFC #388 strict <120s): codex/openclaw bench-time-outs
were the agent-card-never-returns-200 symptom. With this fix those
runtimes serve the card immediately on EC2 boot, so the bench
measures infrastructure cold-start (claude-code class: ~50–80s)
instead of credential-coupled boot.
Adds workspace/not_configured_handler.py (factory + module-level so
behavior is unit-testable; main.py is `# pragma: no cover`) and
workspace/tests/test_not_configured_handler.py (6 tests covering
status code, JSON-RPC envelope shape, id-echo, malformed-body
fallback, reason surfacing, batch-body safety).
All 1665 existing workspace tests pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>