I Tried to Run Symphony for Real on Rentello. It Broke in Exactly the Right Place.

A few weeks ago, I published a build diary about porting OpenAI's Symphony to Claude Code. That piece was about getting the machine to exist. This one is about what happened when I tried to trust it. Not in a toy repo. Not with a fake ticket. Not with a carefully staged demo that only exercised the happy path. I wired the workflow into a real project, Rentello, pointed it at a real Linear board, and tried to make Codex, Claude, and Symphony-family orchestrators coexist on the same execution model. That is when the most useful bug of the whole project appeared. It wasn't a crash inside the orchestration loop. It wasn't a retry bug. It wasn't even a Linear label bug. It was a hidden architectural assumption inside one innocent file: WORKFLOW.md . Phase two of the same story The first article was the infrastructure story. I had taken OpenAI's Symphony architecture, ported the orchestration ideas to work with Claude Code, and documented the engineering journey: configuration, polling, work