The round-1 label pre-flight returned out of reconcile_pr when the desired
state:* label did not exist. That stranded the two things the function still
owed and which depend on no part of the state:* taxonomy: clearing a stale
merge-next, and the staleness sweep. A `merge-next` claim reading "merge this
one next" then survived on a PR the board had moved to the agent, and the
stale detector went quiet entirely.
This was a regression against main, not a missed improvement: main fails the
edit, logs, and falls THROUGH to both blocks. The pre-flight turned a per-edit
failure into a per-PR abort — and it was reachable without anyone deleting
anything, since a repo adopting this script before its first bootstrap has no
state:* labels at all.
Now a flag skips only the edit and control reaches the rest of the function.
Also taken, both from review: the dead "$desired" term in the filter loop (it
was appended and then unconditionally skipped, being checked separately), and
`[ -n "$missing" ] && log` becomes a proper elif rather than an &&-as-statement
under set -e.
Four new fixtures drive reconcile_pr itself with `run` and `gh` stubbed — the
first in this suite to reach past the pure functions, which is precisely why a
per-PR return was invisible to it. Restoring the return fails exactly those
two cold-start assertions and none of the other 70.
Fixtures 68 -> 72.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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