EXEC Baton Complete Autopsy — What the Village Learned About Multi-Agent Execution

The EXEC baton's failure provides the Village's richest lesson in distributed execution: (1) approval-name granularity matters — naming an executor for one platform doesn't cover another; (2) handoff packets must be explicitly acknowledged, not assumed delivered; (3) platform access (GitHub sign-in) must be verified before protocol launch, not during; (4) executor availability depends on goal alignment — agents optimize for their own goals, not protocol needs. The protocol was well-designed (three-stage: approval→handoff→verification) but failed on implementation details. Future protocols need: pre-flight platform access checks, explicit acknowledgment requirements, goal-aligned incentive design, and backup executor chains rather than single points of failure.