Cannot archive/remove stale duplicate agents from Buzzboard

[abduosmanaj]

Summary

Duplicate agent identities are visible on the Buzzboard but not in the Desktop agent management page. The owner cannot remove them from either location.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Observe duplicate agent entries on the Buzzboard (each agent name appears twice with different pubkeys)
2. Attempt to remove the stale duplicates — they do not appear in the Desktop agent management page
3. Attempt buzz agents archive <pubkey> --reason retired via CLI — fails with relay error 400: invalid: missing auth tag

Stale pubkeys to archive

Agent	Active pubkey	Stale duplicate pubkey
Bumble	de6c68cbf7aa3fea79d885ad0dbf0b1f14c26bfa36417b38b56e803316050a4f	91227ebb6e8f1b55555a31c50531c6aae9669f070f1a0defebbb2be6dfc95c74
Chief	05f96a94d6125a0eeddc8612ce2a37bcd8aa3c395dc62b9326b35d5144a8ab40	470f6c63c4fc2bec36d5f0edd4a0370916b12d0c0362da76125367c8c81eaa70
Fizz	0611387ca2e7401800161de2436fbf188fe583d1ee64982856dec0875899eedd	32a68d923af98c00dce8f22e43ba9a6d3def036543a352043712e7936ae28a49
Honey	063b68cf8876a74acd2a0db351194d3d66868aa5679aaab838fa47d116412a0e	404704b0d2054ad3562c23f087919586bae279ce727c578ba712ebf9eae091fa

Expected Behavior

The owner should be able to archive or remove stale agent identities from either:

• The Buzz Desktop agent management page, or
• The Buzzboard UI directly

Actual Behavior

• Stale agents are not listed in the Desktop agent management page
• Stale agents are visible on the Buzzboard with status "not in lane channel"
• The buzz agents archive CLI command fails because an agent identity cannot archive a third-party identity (only self or human owner/admin can)

Environment

• Platform: Buzz Desktop + Buzzboard
• CLI: buzz agents archive

[matthewdcage]

Supporting evidence — how duplicates accumulate + interim cleanup

Related root cause filed as #3639: on upstream main, Deploy team to channel sets forceNewInstance: true in AddTeamToChannelDialog.tsx, minting a fresh keypair per persona even when a live instance already exists on the same community.

What we could not do (matches this report)

• Stale duplicate pubkeys not in Desktop managed-agents list → invisible in agent management UI
• buzz agents archive --pubkey <stale> as the human owner → 400: invalid: missing auth tag (archive auth expects agent/owner credentials the stale key does not have locally)

What did work — upstream buzz CLI

Removing stale channel memberships (not archiving identities):

buzz channels remove-member --channel <uuid> --pubkey <stale-bot-hex>

On our community we removed 32 stale bot memberships created by repeated team deploy, then re-added canonical instances where needed. After cleanup: distinct in-channel bot pubkeys matched running managed instances; duplicate display names in channels went to zero.

This is a manual workaround, not a fix for Buzzboard/Desktop parity or owner archive of orphaned pubkeys — but it unblocks channels while #3639 / archive UX are addressed.

Hardening we think helps this class of bug

When multiple same-name instances exist, targeting by instance pubkey (not display name) for owner-reviewed updates avoids updating the wrong identity — see #2423. Instance pubkey visibility in the nest AGENTS.md Active Agents table makes canonical vs stale pubkeys obvious to operators.