The family-scoping fixture asserted that a foreign marker does not
SILENCE the flag, which a family-blind grep satisfies too. The property
that is load-bearing is the other one: a foreign family late on the
thread must not make the flag re-post. Made family-blind, the sweep now
reds.
D3b says a claimed non-member is flagged whether or not it has an open
PR, and the fixtures covered that for the collision flag only — the
window side, which is the flag the 18:11Z correction was about, had no
case at all.
check() matches its expectation as a substring, so a bare
`issueflow-reconcile` row was satisfied by `issueflow-reconcile.test`
too: the multi-extension rule stayed green under a normalization that
strips only the last extension. keys_of brackets each key, and the
no-em-dash row asserts its emptiness through grep rather than through an
expectation check() cannot make.
Beside them, the cases the two fixes are named for: a self-folding + title
answers its key once and never chains an issue to its own number, and
`needs-triage` and a label-less issue are outside both flags.
B1: deliverable_keys answered a multiset, so a `+` title whose segments
normalize to one key made collision_flags find the issue adjacent to
itself and chain it to its own number — the comment asked an issue to
declare `Blocked by` itself, and two such carriers corrupted the chain
between them. The keys are deduped where the set property belongs.
B2: window_in_scope excluded only blocked/epic/post-merge, admitting
`needs-triage` and label-less issues, so the sweep could add
`needs-triage` to an issue and then tell it about a mint-time membership
call in the same pass. Both flags now call one unblocked_claimable
predicate — #293 D2 corrected gives one gloss on `unblocked` and D3b
says D3 uses it.
The window log line says "unblocked", not "ready": D3b corrected exactly
that wording, and the flag fires on `claimed` too.
Triage ruled all three questions (18:11Z) and corrected the corpus: at the
10:28:54Z mint #257 was `ready`, not `claimed`, and #253 was `claimed`
with NO open PR — #285 was not created until 10:49:16Z. The morning board
takes that shape, which also makes the six `ready` non-members come out as
six, and puts the blocked twin on the board rather than only in a decision
probe.
D2's parenthetical is struck: unblocked = open and not blocked, both flags,
one definition. D3b is corrected in the same direction — a non-member
`claimed` WITH an open PR is flagged too, because a non-member holding a
builder and a review round is #292's competition realized, not a mild case
of it. Nothing in the implementation moves: neither flag ever consulted PR
liveness.
Three cases added, so the fixtures pin the rulings and not the prose:
- both carriers `claimed` with their own PRs open -> still flags. The
ninety-three minutes from #285's creation to its merge are exactly when
the struck parenthetical went silent on a live collision, which made the
flag's firing a property of someone's workflow rather than of the board.
- a fifteen-member declaration with every member closed -> D3 dormant, and
the release issue never flagged as its own non-member. A gate declaration
never empties; the precondition is its OPEN members, read off the board.
- flagged -> resolved -> recreated unchanged -> silent, asserted as D4's
stated boundary rather than left accidental.
Plus today's board — the `blocked` sink, a `claimed` gate member, two
`blocked` issues — which draws nothing. Verified live as well as in
fixtures: a DRY_RUN sweep of this branch against heavy-duty/ceremony's real
board draws zero flags of either kind.
Two advisory flags on the issue-flow sweep, the mechanical backstop for
#288's collision rule and #292's window rule. Both are prose today, and
both failed silently on the same morning: #284 was minted `ready` into a
file another issue held claimed with a PR in flight, and six `ready`
non-members raced an emptying gate. #262 measured the pattern — the same
class of rule, once in a guard, produced zero misses.
Comments only (D1): no label write, no state change, no new label. The
sweep never guesses intent; it states the board fact and triage resolves.
The collision key is the title's em-dash prefix NORMALIZED, because the
2026-08-04 miss spelled one deliverable two ways — `actions/issueflow-reconcile`
against bare `issueflow-reconcile` — so exact-prefix matching would have
missed the pair it was written for. One leading path segment comes off,
then every extension; a `+`-joined title matches on any segment.
The flag asks for a CHAIN, not a fan (#288 D3): within one key each issue
names the newest open carrier below it, so the declaration it asks for
releases exactly one successor per close.
A standing window is a release issue whose gate still holds an OPEN member.
The board read IS the open set, so membership decides openness with no
extra call, and an all-closed gate is the emptied gate the release's own
blocked -> ready promotion answers — which is why a `ready` release leaves
the flag dormant instead of flagging the whole board.
Dedup is the declaration echo's, extracted into state_marker /
state_echo_needed and scoped per family (D4): the marker is keyed to the
offending state's value and compared against that family's last word on
the thread, so a state that changes always speaks.
Fixtures replay the 2026-08-04 morning board whole and the post-ruling
board beside it: the first draws exactly four collision flags and six
window flags and writes not one label; the second draws none.
Closes#293.
lib/attention.sh had #267 D4's premise exactly — both reconcilers source
it, nothing release-side does — and [scope:release-flow] alone was a
wrong answer of the class that decision exists to correct. The sweep
workflow pair joins beside its trigger pair (detached in #209), the
shared-lib tests take scope:labels alone (a test inherits no lib/**
glob), and D4's seven enumerated rows land one each. No catch-all, by
decision: both directories span all four scopes. Each of the 13 new map
rows is protected by its own assertion — deleted alone, each reds
exactly its case.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The state-machine fixtures bound BOT1/BOT2/BOT3 to REQUIRED_BOTS by index off
the shipped .github/labels.conf, so three fixtures silently required a
four-member panel=. Shrinking it to three left the third slot unbound and
set -u aborted the file before assertion 1: 217 assertions became 0, on main
and on every branch cut from it.
The fixtures now write their own conf, in test/labels.test.sh's shape, at all
three load sites (top of file, the #205 re-drafted-round block, and the
mutant_blockers subshell). One live-file case survives as a property — the
shipped conf parses and recuses each member from its own panel — with no
index and no expected size, and a copy whose panel= names nobody proves it
still has teeth.
Refs #304
Claiming a needs-ruling issue dated it through the assigned timeline
event, silencing the 7-day escalation nudge at exactly the moment a
builder started working through it. The ruling block now reads
last_issue_comment_activity (D1); the reclaim clock keeps the assignment
(D2) because there the assignment IS the claim; post-merge hands its
evidence read to the ruling block instead of reading again (D6, D7); the
claimed branch reads both clocks at its top, before anything it posts.
LABELS.md and lib/ruling.sh now say what each surface's clock reads
(D4, D5). The #257-era order compositions move to the comments read —
the timeline is no longer an input the issue clocks take, and its
unreadability no longer holds unrelated writes hostage; that narrowing
is pinned rather than implied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The D3 guard loop passed the action path and its test path to derives in
one call. derive_labels emits scope:guards when either matches, so any one
of the six rows could be deleted with the case still green — three
assertions standing in for six rows. Split into one assertion per path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The self-guards job checks out the merge of this branch with main, so
changelog.d/253.md from #285 reaches changelog_fragment_problem there and
nowhere else; the branch alone is green. Merged rather than rebased
because the round's reviewers track head SHAs.
Refs #262.
awk runs END on the way out of an exit from a main rule, so the length
row printed mid-file was followed by the citation row it outranks — the
internal protocol line landing inside the human-facing excerpt. Found by
claude-bot and kimi-bot in #262's first round, independently and with the
same reproduction.
The guard is the reported flag the empty-heading walk in this same
predicate already uses. The fixtures are the axis 57.md could not reach:
its over-bound entry is last, so only END's flush can print. 58.md puts
one before another bullet, 59.md before a heading and after a misplaced
cite. With lib/changelog.sh alone reverted they red, which is what the
green suite was hiding.
Refs #262.
Scoped to the fixtures the new rule actually binds: a fragment whose
predicate complaint is already its name, a smuggled heading, a dangling
heading or the 300-character bound is left alone, so the diagnosis it
tests is still the one it draws. The section-predicate fixtures are
untouched (D4).
The computed-length fixtures keep their measured lengths: the cite is
seven characters, so an entry that must measure exactly 300 builds 293
of the run and lets the cite carry the rest. 33.md's cite lands on the
last continuation line, which is the wrapped-citation case.
Refs #262
'- Fixed entry.' is shared between the dangling-heading fragment fixture
and the section-predicate fixture, so the global replace crossed D4's
line. Next commit filters to fragments that actually red on the cite rule.
Refs #262
docs/VENDORED.txt and actions/docs-sync/docs-sync.sh entered the tree in
the same commit and are byte-identical at every tag — blobs 10c20a3c and
ba426479 at 0.1.0 through 0.5.0 — and 0.1.0's copy of the tool is already
manifest-driven (MANIFEST="docs/VENDORED.txt", L75). Citing 0.5.0 told the
0.1.0-0.4.1 tail, which is exactly the population this section is written
for, that the manifest was unavailable at its pin, so it would keep the
hardcoded list: #251's failure mode reproduced by the document that exists
to abolish it. The same file already said 0.1.0 at L131-L133.
Also make the guard's tracked-ness skip announce itself. It degrades to
"not asserted" wherever the tree is not a git work tree root, and doing
that in silence is the shape this script's own header argues against, so
the skip now prints on both output paths, green and red, with a test row
each way.
Round 1: claude blocking point, and claude nit 3.
One CI step beside the self-ref pin, and test/vendored.test.sh covering
both directions: the manifest -> tree scan (missing, symlink, directory,
empty, ../ escape, absolute, untracked) and the closed-world root rule
(neither list, vendored, exempted, prose is not an input, no recursion
below the root), plus the real tree unmodified and the RELEASES.md
regression both ways.
The one-off `grep -Fx RELEASES.md` row at test/docs-sync.test.sh is
deleted (#251 D4): two spellings of "the manifest is right" is the drift
the manifest exists to prevent. Its intent is now a guard case, which the
next doctrine file inherits for free.
Refs #251
"a comment, a review or a commit" is the ruling nudge's house phrasing and
false on the issue surface twice over: there is no review or commit fact in
what the sweep reads, and an assignment is no longer counted here. Say
what is read, and say what does not buy another 7 days of silence.
Refs #254
The nudge rode `last_issue_activity`, which counts `assigned` timeline
events because assignment is the claim the 48-hour reclaim protects.
`post-merge` has no claim: an assignee there is the invalid composition
the flag beside it reports, so counting the assignment let a broken board
buy the item another 7 days of silence — this issue's failure direction
taken backwards.
One computation, two clocks over it: `issue_activity_at` is the body,
`last_issue_activity` keeps the reclaim and ruling clocks byte-identical,
and `last_issue_comment_activity` is the evidence clock. Both clocks are
read before this branch posts anything, the ruling one included — read
after, it would date the issue by the evidence nudge's own comment and
silence the ruling nudge, which is the self-silencing the branch already
guarded against in the other direction.
Refs #254
The two 'must fail loudly' cases from the plan: an unparseable body still
nudges and the nudge quotes none of it, and a grep-level pin that no second
7-day constant appears in the sweep.
Refs #254
Covers the must-nudge pair (8 quiet days; post-merge + needs-ruling both
speak), the must-not set (6 days, fresh comment, every other queue state),
self-rate-limiting proven by sweeping again a day later rather than by
asserting a marker's absence, and zero writes across every probe.
Two existing probes move: #36's 'no comment' assertion described the
starvation this issue ends, and #67 gets recent activity so its precedence
count stays the assertion doing the work.
Refs #254
AC-1 names two inputs and says "both by fixture". The suite had the first and,
for the second, only a re-sweep of a BYTE-IDENTICAL body — which is the test
plan's other must-not-echo bullet, and cannot stand in for this one: an
identical body is quiet under both spellings of the decision, the one that
keys on the parse and the one that keys on the prose, so it cannot tell them
apart. Only an edit that changes the prose and preserves the parse can.
The new probe reorders the refs and adds sentences on either side, leaving the
set at {#90, #91}, and asserts the marker count, the thread's total echo count
and the issue-edit count all hold still. What it pins is that the marker is a
function of the PARSE and not of the prose around it — the property the whole
idempotency rests on.
Mutation-proven isolating: an echo that also re-fires when the declaration
prose moved since the last echo — quiet on identical re-sweeps, correct on
every set change — passes the pre-existing suite 304/0 and reds only here.
#263 landed on main after this branch's head and asserts that a healthy
assigned attention under blocked posts nothing at all. The #252 echo makes
every blocked issue carry one comment — its parse — so the proxy is false
while the contract behind it is not: probe 66 draws the parse echo and no
attention diagnostic.
Re-spelled the way the same section's other cases already spell it, as the
absence of the attention-malformed marker, plus a companion assertion that
exactly one comment landed. That is strictly tighter than test -f was: this
case now fails if an attention comment appears beside the echo, which the
old form could not detect once any comment existed.
Refs #252
claude-bot: `{acme.widgets#9}` is not a reachable declared set — the clause
parser stops at the `.` and blocked_reference_records never hands the token
through, though issue_references does answer CROSS for it. The comment claimed
all four were declarations the reconciler accepts. The member stays (the
marker's contract is over the tokens the classifier admits) and the comment
now says which is which.
Refs #252
ensure_comment's any-occurrence grep answers "have I ever said this", which
is right for a flag like blocked-unparseable and wrong for a value that
changes. A -> B -> A found A's own first echo and stayed silent, leaving the
thread's newest echo asserting B while the sweep gated on A: a stale parse
presented as the current one, and the third edit did change the parsed set,
so the criterion says it speaks.
blocked_parse_echo_needed compares this parse's marker against the LAST
blockers-parsed-* marker on the thread. The read stays inside guarded_read /
skip_issue, so an unreadable history still fails closed (#247 D1) rather than
answering "nothing echoed yet" and re-posting. ensure_comment is untouched
for every other caller.
Refs #252
