attend-queue: a row claim leaves a 24-hour lease that blocks the lanes from the item it just flipped to agent-ready

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during attend-queue.

Problem

/work-items:attend-queue claims each row before mutating it, then flips the item to agent-ready and clears the assignee. The claim's lease comment stays live for the binding's full TTL (24 hours), and --ttl-minutes adds to ttl_hours instead of replacing it, so claim --ttl-minutes 30 produced 24.5-hour leases. The tracker exposes no verb that supersedes or releases a lease early, and renew-lease only extends. Worker lanes run as the same GitHub login, but claim backs off from any earlier live lease (CONTRACT.md "Lease protocol", step 4), so every item the attended session just handed to the lanes is unclaimable until the lease expires.

Observed 2026-09-27: 13 items ratified or answered in one attend-queue pass (#3351 #3711 #3713 #3720 #3843 #4595 #4597 #3526 #3589 #3614 #3860 #3945 #4346) carry leases to about 2026-09-28T19:40Z.

Done when

• The attended lane can end its own lease when it finishes a row (a release verb that sets superseded_at on the caller's lease, or attend-queue's flip step does it), and attend-queue calls it after the flip.
• --ttl-minutes semantics are either documented as additive in the claim usage text or changed to allow a sub-hour lease.
• A test covers: attended claim, flip, release; a second same-login claim then succeeds.

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during triage.

Triage: verified, briefed, human-gated

Category: bug. Priority: priority: high (each attended pass blocks the worker lanes from every item it just handed them, for the binding's full lease TTL).

Verification (read-only, against main)

• The tracker seam exposes claim, renew-lease, and reclaim as its lease verbs. None ends a live lease early: renew-lease only extends, and reclaim acts only on an expired lease.
• claim treats the earliest live lease as the winner regardless of holder login. A same-login worker therefore backs off (exit 7) on the lease the attended session left behind.
• The attend-queue skill states this itself: it flips the role label while claimed, clears @me, and says the lease comment "persists until TTL expiry". The skill treats that as an acceptable brief delay. With a 24-hour TTL the delay is a full day.
• TTL: --ttl-minutes (0-59) adds to ttl_hours. The contract documents it as additive, but the claim usage text does not. A sub-hour lease is possible today only with --ttl-hours 0 --ttl-minutes N, so claim --ttl-minutes 30 alone gives 24.5 hours, as reported.

Brief (behavioral contract)

• Release. The lease holder can end its own live lease before TTL expiry, and a later claim by any session, same login included, then succeeds. RECOMMENDED: a seam release <id> --lease-comment-id <n> verb that marks the caller's own lease superseded. It refuses a lease the caller does not hold and is a no-op on an already-superseded lease. Alternative: attend-queue's flip step supersedes the lease itself. That violates the skill's own rule against hand-rolled lease-comment JSON, so it is not recommended.
• Attend-queue calls release after the role-label flip and the assignee clear, while still holding the claim through those writes (preserve the flip-before-clear ordering).
• TTL semantics. The claim usage text states that --ttl-minutes adds to --ttl-hours, and shows how to get a sub-hour lease. Changing it to replace --ttl-hours is a larger contract change and is not recommended.
• Capability. Providers that cannot release declare it in their capabilities, and the caller falls back to today's behavior (exit 6), the same way reclaim does.
• Test. Attended claim, flip, release; a second same-login claim then succeeds. Covered in the GitHub adapter test and in seam conformance for each adapter that declares the capability.

Why human-gated

Adding a verb changes the tracker seam's contract (the lease protocol, capability declarations, conformance) across every adapter. Contract changes to the shared seam are structural, and structural work goes to a human regardless of how clear the recommended path is. The design has a recommended default above; a maintainer confirms or vetoes it and dispatches the work.

Recovery for the 13 items in the report: their leases expire on their own at about 2026-09-28T19:40Z. After that, any lane's session-start reclaim clears them. No manual action is needed unless faster pickup matters.

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during work-loop.

Reproduced from the worker side. Work-loop lane melo-lap-001-wsl-2, cycle 3 (2026-09-27 at about 19:21Z):

• Its first ratified C3 item was playbooks: repo-sweep overengineering entry walks out-of-repo layers with no default scope #4597, which attend-queue flipped to agent-ready at 19:07Z.
• The seam claim exited 7: live lease (comment 5858854887, holder kyle-sexton) wins — backing off.
• The lease is attend-queue's row claim from 19:06:58Z. Here it carries ttl_minutes: 30, not 24 hours.
• overengineering:audit: make the neutral-name-then-rename write the default for unattended runs and apply it to every per-layer write #4595 (lease at 19:06:50Z) and playbooks: regenerate the fable-5 doctrine for Fable 5.1 #4346 (lease at 19:13:57Z) are in the same state.

Every ratified item is therefore undispatchable until its row-claim lease expires. Releasing the lease when the row is resolved would remove the wait.

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during work-loop.

Correction to my earlier comment. ttl_minutes: 30 is additive to ttl_hours: 24 (tools/work-item-tracker/CONTRACT.md: "Optional config.lease_ttl_minutes (0–59 additive minutes) combines with lease_ttl_hours"), so these attend-queue row-claim leases last 24h30m, not 30 minutes.

Confirmed at about 19:42Z: a fresh seam claim on #4597 still exits 7 with live lease (comment 5858854887, holder kyle-sexton) wins. #4597, #4595 and #4346 cannot be dispatched until about 19:36Z–19:44Z tomorrow unless the lease is released. The holder is the identity every lane shares, and each lease was acquired seconds before the attend-queue ratification comment on the same item.

[kyle-sexton]

This was generated by AI during attend-queue.

Workaround applied 2026-09-27 with operator approval: the 13 attend-queue leases listed above were superseded in place through the adapter's own wit_patch_lease_comment (adding superseded_at, the same shape claim.sh writes when it loses a race), and @me was cleared from each item. A release verb would make this unnecessary.

[kyle-sexton]

Audit note from the 2026-09-29 audit of the Cursor run. Not reopened: the acceptance criteria (release verb, attend-queue calls it, --ttl-minutes documented as additive, test) were delivered by #4690.

Residue found and fixed in #5325 (Refs #4609): the onboard-adapter generator, its capabilities test template, adapter-spec.md, the gitea and linear adapter-spec.json files, and the provider docs did not know the release verb, so regenerating an adapter would have dropped it. A drift test now checks the generator's verb list, the dispatcher's, and every bundled capabilities.json.

Still missing: the live GitHub end-to-end probe (conformance/e2e-probe.sh) does not exercise release. Adding it needs a live GitHub run by the operator. Also, docs/cloud-sessions.md still says "lease trio"; that is routed to the core-docs fix group.