Dispatch Master — eligibility, ranking, grants and redispatch

[zenithruneblade]

Purpose and boundary

Map the Dispatcher surface from typed capability demand to one exact eligible grant, and route each bounded delivery slice without turning dispatch into lifecycle orchestration or workflow ownership.

ADR 22 — Dispatcher owns accepted dispatch law. ADR 23 — Orchestrator owns physical convergence. This issue is a decomposition and evidence map, not another runtime component.

Child-issue register

• Dispatch — capability selection & leases #7 — first capability selection, exact WARM grant, and lease path
• Dispatch — configurable ranking & bounded fallback #17 — configurable ranking and bounded fallback among already eligible candidates

Related constraints and consumers

• Orchestration — multi-model switching & resource policy #16 owns resource policy and admission inputs.
• Capabilities — admit one typed non-model service #42 proves one typed non-model capability without creating a parallel dispatcher.
• Graph — one local conversation workflow #8 consumes grants from Graph execution and must park handle-free when readiness requires convergence.
• Workers & Ghouls — durable service jobs and recovery #22 owns durable service attempts and worker recovery.
• Advanced execution — architecture and evidence review #62 reviews the advanced composition of concurrent Intents and execution roads; it does not own Dispatcher implementation.

Required decision sequence

typed demand + pinned policy
→ enumerate declared candidates
→ reject semantic / authority / evidence / readiness ineligibility
→ rank only the eligible set
→ issue one exact WARM grant and lease
   or return a typed refusal / wait-for-convergence result
→ after convergence or changed evidence, redispatch from fresh truth

Laws to preserve

• Eligibility is a hard gate; scoring never rescues an ineligible candidate.
• Provider identity, capability interface, semantic compatibility, readiness, and authority remain distinct.
• Dispatcher selects and grants; it never starts, stops, drains, or mutates a managed capability.
• A cold-but-admissible capability produces a wait/converge/redispatch cycle, not a silent semantic fallback.
• Fallback is limited to declared, semantically compatible alternatives and a total retry/effect budget.
• Possible submitted effects reconcile under their original identity; they are not blindly reissued through another road.
• Decisions pin policy generation and evidence provenance sufficient for replay, audit, and honest refusal.
• Leases are bounded, fenced, and released before a Run parks for work it awaits.

Completion condition

Close this master when the first grant path and bounded ranking/fallback path have executable evidence; every eligibility and readiness row has deterministic behavior; redispatch after convergence uses fresh evidence; and the remaining advanced policies are separately owned or explicitly deferred.

Closure means dispatch law and delivery routes are coherent. It does not claim general scheduling, fleet placement, or arbitrary workflow orchestration.