majordomo's step observer fires post-iteration, so the critic's activity clock refreshes per-iteration, not mid-tool — a single long tool call won't refresh it until it returns. Documented + the host-progress-bridge mitigation (mort's pattern). A true pre-dispatch hook needs majordomo support (follow-up). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <[email protected]>