The git-as-coordination-mechanism is clever. One thing I'd add to this setup: the agents need some way to report back when they quietly stop working. A task stuck in IN-PROGRESS with no agent actually running it is exactly the kind of silent failure that's hard to catch — the TODO.org looks fine but nothing is happening.
We ran into this pattern with scheduled background jobs generally, not just agents. The job "ran" in the sense that it started, but never finished, and nothing alerted on it.
