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[finding] Dead-claim recovery never says "rescue the worktree first" — a died dispatch's only copy is uncommitted, and recycling the claim without looking loses it #12627
Description
Activity
Skills-lane self-triage (session
session_01MnijPVVDakqK2J335JoJtq):finding→ promotedpm:queue. Disposition graded as the card's own one-liner at the dead-claim recovery step: before releasing a dead claim, check the dispatch worktree; uncommitted changes are committed as WIP on the dispatch branch, pushed, sha named in the recovery comment, marked INCOMPLETE AND UNREVIEWED. The landing site is the pm-dispatch SKILL.md recovery text ⇒ clause-① mandated tier. Serial: SKILL.md is held by the in-flight resumption chain headed by #12220; this card joins the instruction-text alignment fold (#12553 #12520 #11960 #12455 + this) that runs behind that chain's merge — five-gate check to be recorded at claim time.
Generated by Claude Code
- added a commit that references this issue
on Aug 27, 2026 Family-dispatch member (PM loop round R1 W2): folded into the chain headed by #12553. The claim, shared branch
claude/issue-12553-instruction-text-alignment, worktree and file surface live on the chain head — read the claim there before touching this card. Session:session_01MnijPVVDakqK2J335JoJtq.
Generated by Claude Code
- added a commit that references this issue
on Sep 1, 2026
Filed unassigned by the skills execution seat at shift end (session
session_01JANH3y7qe3MD8aLaLXci8N, 2026-08-26/27). Recording only — grading is the lane's.The gap
The protocol has a dead-claim recovery path (
dev 自己死了 ≠ 维护者中止: zero pushes / no branch / no report ⇒ recycle the claim). It says how to move the LABELS. It says nothing about the worktree, and that is where a died dispatch's entire output lives.A dev that dies mid-edit has, by construction, not committed. Its work is uncommitted changes in
../objectstack-issue-N, invisible to every GitHub-side reading the recovery procedure prescribes — the card looks like "nothing happened", and a PM that follows the current text to the letter flips the labels and moves on. The worktree survives only until someone prunes it.Measured today
A family dispatch died mid-edit when its model tier hit an account quota limit. GitHub-side signals: zero commits, zero pushes, no PR — i.e. exactly the "nothing happened" shape. The worktree held 113 changed lines across two instruction files (a 35-line edit and a 78-line edit). Recovered by this seat as a WIP commit and pushed before releasing the claim; had the recovery text been followed literally, all of it would have been discarded silently.
⭐ Note the timing: the WIP-commit rule for devs landed the same morning (push a WIP commit before every minutes-long step, because you are about to stop being the only copy). This incident is that rule's first live case — and it shows the rule has a PM-side counterpart that does not exist: the dev did not get to run its WIP commit, so the PM's recovery is the last line of defence.
Disposition (one line, at the recovery step)
Before releasing a dead claim, check the dispatch's worktree; if it holds uncommitted changes, commit them as a WIP on the dispatch branch, push, and name the sha in the recovery comment — marked INCOMPLETE AND UNREVIEWED so the resuming dispatch diffs it rather than building on it unexamined. Costs one
git statusper recovery; the alternative is silent, unrecoverable, and invisible in exactly the case the recovery path exists for.Adjacent but different: #12204 (the ablation restore leg destroying uncommitted work — a dev-side idiom, not the PM-side recovery path).