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.
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>
"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
Anchoring every pair on the `/` spelling passed under a fix that only
taught the slug about `/` — and that fix still collapses `acme-widgets#9`,
`acme_widgets#9` and `acme.widgets#9` onto one marker. Found by mutating
the implementation to that cheap fix and watching the suite stay green on
the cases that matter. The contract is that no two distinct parses
collide, so the assertion is now every pair.
Refs #252
The marker claimed to be scoped to the parsed set's value and was scoped
to a lossy rendering of it: `tr -c '[:alnum:]' '-'` maps `acme/widgets#9`
and `acme-widgets#9` — both parses this reconciler accepts — onto one
marker, so a declaration edited between them found the old echo and said
nothing. Silence in exactly the case the echo exists to speak about.
The identity is now a digest of the exact rendered set. The readable slug
stays in front of it and decides nothing. Distinguishing `/` would have
closed the reported pair and left the class: `-`, `_` and `.` are all
legal in a qualifier and all collapse the same way, so all four are
pinned, and the sweep probe observes the second echo actually landing.
Refs #252
The idempotency contract is the marker's scope, so both directions are
pinned: an unchanged set must reuse its marker (or a 15-minute cron
repeats itself forever) and a changed one must not (or a misparse hides
under a marker the thread already carries). crew#308's negated clause is
replayed through the sweep, and the empty parse is echoed beside the
untouched `blocked-unparseable` flag.
Refs #252
The per-read guards closed the reported class — a failed read never reaches
a decision function — and left one layer standing. A pass could mutate and
only THEN reach a guarded read, fail it, and report the issue as skipped:
`stale` removed, or `needs-triage` minted, under a log line saying the
sweep had touched nothing. That is the same false report #247 exists to
close, told from the other end, and the panel reproduced it on four
separate compositions.
Fixed as the ordering invariant rather than per site. Inside
reconcile_issue_pass's subshell, run() and log() stage their effects, and
commit_staged_effects replays them in order once the pass has completed.
skip_issue emits its own line directly and exits, so the buffer dies with
the subshell. A skip therefore implies zero `gh issue edit`, zero
`gh issue comment`, and no log line about a mutation that never landed —
for compositions nobody has written yet, because reconcile_issue has no way
to mutate directly. Reads stay where they are: they may happen anywhere,
since nothing lands until the end.
Stated per site it would hold until the next composition. Two consequences
worth naming: reconcile_ruling is covered without touching lib/ruling.sh,
because it posts through the sourcing script's run()/log() — the PR surface
keeps its own and is unaffected; and a genuine crash mid-pass now also
lands nothing, where before it left the earlier mutations applied. D4's
handler string, D6's tail and D7's exit 0 are all unchanged, and the
healthy path is byte-identical: every staged write commits under the same
`>/dev/null` its call site already applied.
Refs #247
The sourced stub returned a literal `[]` to --jq callers when a fixture
was missing, where the real API answers an empty list and the filter
yields nothing. last_issue_activity then sorted `[]` beside an ISO-8601
timestamp — and `[]` outsorts a timestamp in the C locale but not in a
UTF-8 one, so the sweep dated an issue by a stub artifact on the runner
and by created_at here.
The old code swallowed the resulting `date` failure and graded the claim
on a literal 0 anyway; #247's guards turn a failed read into a skip,
which is what made the lie visible. Adopt the arrival stub's shape.
Suite green under LC_ALL=C, C.UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8.
Refs #247
The .http-error mode applies a requested --jq filter to the error body,
so a failing comments read returns nothing rather than a JSON blob —
which is what let last_issue_activity fall back to created_at and
reclaim a live claim. With it, all three of the issue's must-fail-before
cases fail against the pre-change script, the destroyed claim included.
Pin offsite_timeline's own deliberate silence directly: the activity
read hits the same endpoint, so probe 32 now skips before the offsite
verification it used to reach (D8 leaves that read alone).
Refs #247
The PATH-stubbed gh gains a `.http-error` mode: the response body goes
to STDOUT, the reason to stderr, the status non-zero. The existing
`.error` sentinel produces empty stdout, which is the *safe* path — an
empty label set either way — and is why this class was never caught.
The three must-fail-before cases, plus the 200-`null` path a status
check alone leaves open, the suppressed-marker duplicate, the D6 tail's
count and numbers, and the crash handler proven distinct from a skip.
Refs #247
`gh api` prints a 5xx response body to stdout AND exits non-zero, and
GitHub's 5xx body is a JSON object. Inside the per-issue subshell that
payload passed `has("pull_request") | not`, emptied `.labels[]`, and
`queue_decision` — correct on the input it was handed — wrote
`needs-triage` onto a healthy epic. The run then logged `reconciled.`
and exited 0 (crew#329, #247).
errexit could not have caught it: a command whose status is tested by
`||` runs with errexit suppressed, and the suppression extends through
the whole subshell body, so the `|| log` handler is what disables the
errexit that would have aborted at the failed read. Removing the handler
revives errexit and loses #91's resilience, and an inline `set -e` does
not re-arm it. Explicit per-read checks are the mechanism.
Every read inside that subshell is now checked — the issue read on its
status AND on its payload shape (an HTTP 200 whose body is `null` exits
0 and empties the label set just the same), both reads in
`last_issue_activity`, and the comments read in
`issue_comment_has_marker`. On failure the issue is left exactly as it
is, the reason rides its own `#$n:` line, and the subshell exits with a
distinguished status the sweep counts, so a deliberate skip is not
reported as a crash and a genuine crash is still named byte-identically.
`read_failure_reason` moves to lib/read.sh beside a new `guarded_read`,
sourced by both reconcilers: labels-reconcile's copy was the only one,
and the issue surface needs the identical rule.
Refs #247
issue_probe's merged-PR argument becomes a spec list — `PR` or `PR@<iso>`
— so a probe can state merge order; the bare form keeps every existing call
site literal.
The direct-drive cases cover crew#176's shape (the lower number merged
later), agreeing orders, interleaved issues, the mergedAt tie broken by
highest PR number under both input orders, and the empty answer. The
end-to-end probe is crew#321's: a marker already standing for the
later-merged, lower-numbered PR must suppress the transition, which
selecting by number could never do.
Two static pins keep the request count honest — the sweep issues exactly two
GraphQL queries, with mergedAt selected on the merged-PR node it already
fetched.
Refs #242
One resolution point (panel_for_author) feeds set_required_bots; the
author's row when the conf defines one, the base panel= otherwise, minus
the author in either case. Bracket prefixes are matched quoted so the
case patterns cannot glob (D7, panela= tripwire). configured_label_rows
skips the rows so a dispatch bootstrap cannot mint a label named after
one. BUILDER.md/REVIEWER.md carry the one D9 wording; CONSUMERS.md
publishes the row as unreleased with the parse-failure warning.
Refs #224
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The sweep rode the same workflow run as the PR event that woke it, so
every displacement in the shared labels-reconcile queue recorded a
CANCELLED reconcile check on some PR — fake red CI that held review
requests. The reconcile + issueflow jobs move, unchanged, to a new
reusable labels-sweep.yml behind their own caller; labels.yml gains a
trigger job that dispatches the consumer's sweep caller with the plain
GITHUB_TOKEN (workflow_dispatch is a documented no-retrigger exemption)
on every event that used to run reconcile. A displaced sweep now cancels
on the Actions tab, attached to no PR; PR checks show scope + trigger.
Because every trigger-driven wake arrives as workflow_dispatch, the event
name alone no longer separates the operator's manual bootstrap from an
event-woken sweep: the sweep caller's bootstrap dispatch input does — the
trigger passes no, a bare manual dispatch defaults to yes. The sweep
reusable also takes pr_workflow_name, exported as SELF_WORKFLOW for the
#208 reconciler (harmless to earlier ones; zero file overlap with #208).
The trigger is deliberately loud: a pin bumped without the sweep caller,
its bootstrap input, or actions: write on the labels caller goes red at
the trigger job instead of silently never sweeping again — documented in
docs/CONSUMERS.md with the split stubs and the atomic-adoption note.
Refs #209
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Binding to the first marker occurrence dropped every later sentence of a
repeated declaration and let earlier prose hijack the parse — the false
ready promotion on rig#154. Each occurrence now contributes its own
clause, terminated at its own first ./; (unterminated -> end of input),
and the union feeds the unchanged classification and decision table.
Closes#184
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
reconcile_opened_issue's two early exits were bare returns, which carry
the failed guard's status into the executed script's set -e — every
triage-authored mint killed the labels run before one issue was
reconciled (#91, 4/4 observed). The stand-downs now say return 0; a
genuine failure on the arrival path still aborts loudly.
The suite sources the script and takes the set -u-only branch, so it
was blind to this by construction. The new arrival section executes the
script as a subprocess behind a fixture-serving gh stub (the house
pattern from test/release-chain.test.sh) and covers all three arrival
outcomes plus the preserved loud-failure path; it fails against
bb37c15 with the production signature — exit 1, empty output.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pure decisions (shape presence, rung boundaries, Default: parse for wording
only), sweep probes for every AC path (malformed-once, conforming silence,
rungs despite activity, cron progression, missed-moment skip, re-flag
episode, unreadable comment list, malformed+rung same pass), and the
existing nudge fixtures updated to conforming escalations with pre-seeded
rung markers so each probe observes one behavior alone.
Part of #73.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Issue side: invariant-1 composition, the reclaim clock stopping under a
pending ruling (with a flag-free reclaim control), the stale heal, label
churn invisible to the activity clock, the surface-level nudge reset, and
no edit anywhere naming the flag. PR side: the wired nudge riding the
stale sweep's activity computation, one nudge across two sweeps, #51's
stale skip intact.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
