fix(prompts): 3b burn-down leaves reopened items wearing both roles, and never consumes a fired trigger

[kyle-sexton]

Two valid findings landed on #1594 from the reviewer's fifth pass, seconds after it squash-merged as c4e33461. Both are in prompts/loops/loop-lane-prompts.md, in the 3b parked-decision burn-down block and its profile render (the block appears twice — fix both).

1. A reopened item wearing both canonical roles (regression from #1594)

#1594's parking invariant — "Nothing this session opens or parks stays role-less" — has the burn-down apply the resolved human-gated role when it reopens a closed trigger carrier. Closing an item does not clear its labels, so a carrier that was closed while autonomous-eligible reopens wearing both canonical roles.

plugins/work-items/skills/work-loop/SKILL.md:240-245 treats that state as a contradiction, not a tolerable overlap: "apply the human-gated role label and remove the autonomous-eligible one in the same edit … never flip without clearing, since an item wearing both roles is a contradiction every consumer reads differently." A Re-park outcome then preserves the contradiction indefinitely.

Fix: the reopen/create bullet of the parking invariant should remove the resolved autonomous-eligible role in the same edit that applies the human-gated one — the same shape the Flip outcome already uses in the other direction.

This one is a regression introduced by #1594's own round-4 fix, so it is the higher priority of the two.

2. A fired trigger is never consumed

Population 3 reopens a closed item whose trigger has fired, but nothing marks the trigger consumed and the text stays in comment history. If the operator then chooses Decide and close or Re-home, the next burn-down inside the 90-day closed-item lookback sees the same permanently-true trigger ("after …") and reopens the source item again — and a repeated Re-home can re-file the same item cross-repository each pass.

#1594 fixed the analogous problem for open rows (an unfired trigger is now report-only), but a fired trigger on a closed item has no consumption record.

Fix options, for whoever picks this up:

• consider only the latest unresolved trigger on an item, ignoring superseded ones; or
• record consumption when the resulting disposition completes — a marker comment the sweep reads, which the burn-down can write since it already writes the disposition comment.

The second composes with the disclaimer contract already inlined in the block; the first needs no new state but relies on trigger ordering being meaningful.

Context

#1594's review ran five rounds, each on a new head commit. Rounds 1–4 (13 threads) were evaluated, fixed and resolved before merge; this round arrived post-merge. Related out-of-scope finding from the same review: #1612.

[kyle-sexton]

🤖 Claim released by the autonomous babysit lane (fable-autopilot) — closed by PR #1615, squash fe331930. Both items implemented across three review rounds, all threads resolved.

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during triage.

Triage: verified — both findings, and a fix is already in flight

Confirmed by reading the 3b parked-decision burn-down block at origin/main (the local checkout was behind the merge that introduced it; verification was done against the fetched remote tip, not the stale working tree). The block does appear twice, and the file states that the second copy must stay a verbatim render of the first.

Finding 1 — reopened item wearing both canonical roles: confirmed, and it is a regression.
The parking invariant's reopen/successor bullet applies the resolved human-gated role to a closed trigger carrier being reopened, and says nothing about the autonomous-eligible role. Closing an item does not clear labels, so a carrier closed while autonomous-eligible comes back wearing both. The Flip outcome in the same block is explicitly symmetric in the other direction — one edit that applies the autonomous role and removes the human-gated role and the decision-pending label if present — so the asymmetry is real, not implied. The worker-lane skill's role-label rule independently calls that state "a contradiction every consumer reads differently" and requires the two edits in one operation, which makes this a genuine contract violation rather than a tolerable overlap. A Re-park outcome preserves it indefinitely.

Finding 2 — fired trigger never consumed: confirmed.
The population-3 sweep evaluates trigger text on items closed within the last 90 days and reopens or files a successor. Nothing in the block records that a trigger has been acted on, and the trigger text persists in comment history. A past-dated trigger stays permanently true, so a Decide and close or Re-home disposition puts the carrier straight back into the next pass's lookback — reopening the same item again, or filing another cross-repository successor for the same source, each pass. The block's companion rule fixed the analogous problem for open rows (an unfired trigger is report-only); no equivalent consumption record exists for a fired trigger on a closed item.

Category: bug (behavioral defect in a runtime prompt surface).

Agent Brief

Type: Bug
Summary: The 3b parked-decision burn-down block leaves a reopened trigger carrier wearing both canonical role labels, and never records that a fired trigger has been acted on.

Current behavior:
Applying the human-gated role when reopening or exposing an item does not clear a previously-applied autonomous-eligible role, producing the both-roles state the worker lane's own rule forbids. Separately, a fired trigger leaves no consumption record, so it fires again on every subsequent pass within the closed-item lookback window.

Desired behavior:
The parking invariant applies the resolved human-gated role and removes the resolved autonomous-eligible role in the same edit — the Flip outcome's clearing rule run in the opposite direction. A fired trigger is spent exactly once: after the sweep acts on it, a later pass within the lookback window must not re-fire the same trigger, and a newer trigger recorded by a Re-park supersedes the one it retired.

Key interfaces:

• The parking invariant ("nothing this session opens or parks stays role-less") and its reopen/successor bullet.
• The Flip outcome's single-edit clearing rule — the symmetric shape the invariant should mirror.
• The population-3 trigger sweep and its 90-day closed-item lookback.
• The provenance-marker contract the block already mandates for every comment and item body it authors.

Acceptance criteria:

• No path through the block can leave an item carrying both canonical roles.
• Acting on a fired trigger is idempotent across passes: a carrier disposed of by Decide-and-close or Re-home is not reopened, and no duplicate successor is filed, on any later pass inside the lookback window.
• A Re-park's freshly recorded trigger supersedes the trigger it retired.
• Every change lands in both renders of the 3b block, and the two renders remain byte-identical, per the file's own statement that the profile section is a verbatim render of the template.
• Markdown lint passes on the changed file.

Out of scope:

• The population-1/2 queries and the exclusion list.
• The verify-before-ratify pipeline and the work-class proposal rule.
• The decision-pending binding gap, recorded separately in the file's "Known gaps".

Coordination — read before starting work

PR #1615 (fix/1613-reopen-role-contradiction) is open and carries a Closes #1613 keyword covering both findings, in both renders of the block, and an autonomous babysit lane (fable-autopilot) holds a live claim lease on this item.

The item is labelled autonomous-eligible because withholding that label would not actually remove it from the autonomous frontier — the frontier query excludes the human-gated role rather than requiring the autonomous one, so a role-less open item is already a candidate. Frontier exclusion needs an assignee, which belongs to the lane holding the lease, not to triage. The label therefore states the honest triage verdict, and this section carries the coordination signal.

Anything reaching this item before #1615 merges should review that PR rather than re-author the fix. If #1615 is closed unmerged, the brief above stands as-is.

Labels applied

Bug (native issue type), priority: medium, agent-ready, status: ready; priority: needs-triage cleared. Assessed-default priority tier — the reporter marked finding 1 "the higher priority of the two", which orders the two findings within the item, not the item against the backlog; nothing here blocks other work or carries an external deadline.

Role-label resolution warning: this repository's .work-item-tracker.json carries no config.role_labels entry, so the canonical roles resolve to their documented defaults (agent-ready / needs-human). Both strings exist as labels here, so the fallback is correct — but it is a fallback, not a binding.