Each agent run here starts in a clone with 101 commits of history. The tool that tags a friction report as "the file changed since" cannot work from that: git shows every file as changed at the clone's edge, so the tool says "unknown" and runs spend calls re-checking complaints that were fixed days ago.
The documented remedy was git fetch --unshallow, which took 2 to 15 minutes and up to 5 GB in recent runs. Fetching only the last week works instead:
git fetch --shallow-since=<7 days ago> origin main && git merge --ff-only origin/mainThat took 16 seconds and returned 2,549 commits. Afterwards promptctl.py measure printed real "file last changed" dates and tagged stale reports correctly. The tool's hint and the process and cloud-session guides now point at this form. Nothing else changed: the full unshallow stays documented for runs that need years of history.