Tech-debt tracker — non-blocking follow-ups

[SSFSKIM]

The parent for non-blocking follow-ups on the doperpowers plugin itself (same shape as the consumer-repo tech-debt sink: review findings and known costs that don't block a merge land here instead of getting lost).

Open items

• board snapshot caching — a dispatching tick runs ~3 full-board GraphQL snapshots per ticket #25 — board snapshot caching (~3 full-board GraphQL snapshots per dispatched ticket; act if the board grows ~10×)
• test gap: hermetic case for the normalize-owners-before-bind preflight #24 — hermetic test for the normalize-owners-before-bind preflight (live-validated only)
• retired-worker sessions linger in the harness session list — a burst of failed dispatches (e.g. the 2026-07-19 launchd-cwd incident: 20 retired 490-* metas, 9 retired review-pr-574 metas) leaves a pile of dead-but-listed sessions the human ends up closing by hand. daemon-retire.sh deliberately never touches transcripts (resume stays possible); worth a purge-tier cleanup verb or an age-gated registry GC for retired metas. Investigation first: what can the harness actually delete?

Conventions

• One child issue per item once it's actionable; a checklist line is enough while it's just a known cost.
• This issue carries the tech-debt label so review tooling that looks for the standing tech-debt sink finds it.

[SSFSKIM]

Two non-hermetic test suites (found while reviewing PR #35)

Both are pre-existing — the scripts under test and the test files are
byte-identical between origin/main and PR #35's head, so neither is that PR's
doing. Deferred as non-blockers, but both cost this pipeline real time: they made
a clean PR look like it had three regressions, and a review worker that runs the
repo's own suites to verify a PR's Validation Evidence will keep hitting them.

1. tests/reviewing-prs/test-review-dispatch.sh:854 — false failure when the checkout path contains review-pr-3

assert_not_contains "$(cat "$SPAWN_LOG")" "review-pr-3" "failing first PR is not spawned"
is a fixed-string substring match. The spawn log contains the fully rendered
worker prompt, which carries absolute plugin paths — including the directory the
suite is being run from. When that directory is a review worktree named
review-pr-35, the log holds review-pr-35 nine times, and grep -F "review-pr-3" matches it. The negative assertion fails even though PR 3 was
never spawned.

Observed: 2 failures at PR #35's head when run from
.claude/worktrees/review-pr-35 (failing first PR is not spawned and
bad PR after a good one is never spawned (no stale-state dispatch)),
reproducibly, 2 runs of 2. The identical tree run from a scratch checkout at a
path without that substring: all tests passed. Evidence:

$ grep -o "review-pr-3[0-9]*" head-review-dispatch-2.log | sort | uniq -c
   2 review-pr-3
   9 review-pr-35

Severity: low as a product defect, moderate as pipeline friction — it fires for
any review of PR #3, #30–#39, obra#300–obra#399, … i.e. whenever the reviewer's own
worktree name contains the needle. Fix direction: anchor the assertion to a
whole spawn-name token (e.g. match review-pr-3 / spawn:--no-wait review-pr-3
with the trailing delimiter, or assert against just the spawn-name field rather
than the whole log, the way the same file's [model=] bracketing trick already
does).

2. tests/issue-tracker/test-board-scripts.sh:382-396 — timing-flaky lock-wait race

The lock-wait park case holds $DAEMON_HOME/.metalock for a fixed 1.0 s,
backgrounds board-bind.sh at t≈0 s, then runs a real board-transition.sh 999 needs-human at t≈0.2 s and expects the park to land before the lock releases. When
board-transition.sh takes longer than ~0.8 s, the contender acquires the lock
while the ticket is still ready-for-agent, binds legitimately, and all three
assertions fail together:

[FAIL] bind re-reads needs-human after lock acquisition
[FAIL] lock-wait park keeps the original owner
[FAIL] lock-wait contender never acquires the parked ticket

Evidence that it is nondeterministic rather than a real regression: identical
code in the identical directory gave pass / FAIL / pass across three consecutive
runs. Separately, origin/main failed a different assertion on one run
(html payload carries the interactive-preferred class) and passed on four
others, including three under deliberate 8-way CPU load — so the suite has more
than one timing-sensitive spot.

Fix direction: make the handoff explicit instead of timed — have the lock holder
release on a marker file the test writes after board-transition.sh returns,
rather than on time.sleep(1.0).

Note on the third suite

tests/implementing-tickets/test-implement-dispatch.sh aborts immediately
(rc=1, no assertion output) when run from a directory that is not a git work
tree. Not a defect worth fixing — just a trap for anyone verifying a PR from a
git archive snapshot. git init in the snapshot is enough.

(Reviewer: review-pr-35 worker, PR #35 / ticket #33.)

[SSFSKIM]

engine:claude called "redundant" is only true when no global override is set

Finding — skills/issue-tracker/SKILL.md:155-156 (added by PR #35): "Label
engine:codex to put one ticket back on the gateway; engine:claude is
redundant now but still valid."

Severity — low (engine ranked it P3). Deferred as a non-blocker: PR #35 was
at its fix-wave cap, and this is wording precision in operator-facing prose, not
a behavioral defect. Routed here rather than waved because momentum on a correct
change outranks polish.

Why it is still worth fixing — the redundancy claim holds only in the default
configuration. WORKER_ENGINE=codex remains a supported override (the same PR
documents it in references/sweep-setup.md:103, and both the review and land
dispatchers rely on that variable), and labels win over the environment. So the
moment an operator exports WORKER_ENGINE=codex, engine:claude is the only
per-ticket way back onto plain Claude — the opposite of redundant. An operator
who reads "redundant" as "safe to strip" would silently change routing for that
ticket.

Note this is not a defect introduced by the flip itself: it is a statement that
is true by default and false under a documented override.

Fix direction — qualify rather than delete: say engine:claude is redundant
when no WORKER_ENGINE override is set, and remains the per-ticket override
when one is. One clause; the surrounding resolution order (label → $WORKER_ENGINE → default) already states the mechanism correctly one line above.

(Reviewer: review-pr-35 worker, PR #35 / ticket #33, engine round 3.)

[SSFSKIM]

Pre-existing test failure (found 2026-07-28 during multi-lens exit checks, reproduced on clean main): tests/claude-code/test-subagent-driven-development.sh Test 2 'Workflow ordering' fails — assert_order expects the live model's answer to match literal 'First:.*spec.*compliance', current model answers phrase it differently. Severity: low (test brittleness, skill content unchanged). Fix: loosen the pattern or pin the answer structure harder in the test prompt. Evidence: 3 consecutive fails (worktree + main), all other tests in the file pass.

[SSFSKIM]

RESOLVED (2026-07-28, follow-up to the earlier note): the test-subagent-driven-development.sh failure was model capitalization drift — the answer 'First: Spec compliance review' no longer matched the case-sensitive pattern 'First:.*spec.*compliance'. Fix landed on main: assert_contains and assert_order in tests/claude-code/test-helpers.sh are now case-insensitive (semantic-presence assertions over live model prose; assert_not_contains deliberately left case-sensitive), the Test 5 'reviewer reads code' phrasing net was broadened, and the SC2155 shellcheck warnings in the helpers were fixed. Full run-skill-tests.sh suite: STATUS PASSED.