'start' was a plain alias for 'pause' — both branches called the same toggle:
if data == 'start' or data == 'pause':
start_or_pause_bot(controllers)
So a caller retrying a timed-out 'start' PAUSED the bot. On 2026-08-28 a
restart routine sent it three times and the bot sat frozen for 4h50m of an
overnight run, stopping at the next state change because trigger_or_stop blocks
while _pausing is set.
The verification that should have caught it failed too: 'status' returned
controllers.game.is_running, which tracks the game controller and not
Bot._pausing, so a paused bot answered running=True.
Both fixed:
- 'start' is idempotent — starts a stopped bot, resumes a paused one, and is a
no-op on a healthy one. 'pause'/'toggle' remain the toggle.
- 'status' reports "running=X paused=Y".
The handler was extracted from an inline closure into handle_hermes_command()
so this is testable behaviourally rather than by asserting on source text.
Verified by falsification: restoring the original semantics makes the suite
fail with "repeated 'start' paused a healthy bot" and "status hides the pause
state: 'running=True'"; the fix makes all five pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
