Three root causes, all reported from one live multi-repository board, all ending as noise or
as a dead end an operator had to clear.
A SUCCESSFUL MERGE ABORTED ITSELF. The in-flight fence gives up ownership as soon as a card
leaves the resolved review lane — correct for a REVISE pulling the card back to
implementation, wrong for the move to the complete lane that the merge performs on success.
Measured: `all 2 sub-repo(s) landed — task → done` at 19:58:00.762, then
`Aborting active merge (left-review-lane-during-merge)`. Nothing was actually cancelled —
both repositories were already on main — but the primitive was torn down after the fact,
which is why one merge wrote `Workflow node merge requested merge` twice, 132ms apart. Fired
a few hundred milliseconds earlier it would abort a merge genuinely mid-flight. This is the
COLUMN half of what FN-184 fixed for the STATUS half, in the same file: "the fence revokes the
very merge it is guarding".
A DUPLICATE ENDED AS AN ERROR. MULT-024 was closed through the duplicate sentinel — no commits
expected, implementation must not proceed — and the merge boundary then demanded a pre-merge
node result it could not possibly have, terminalizing it with "operator action required". A
task that did exactly what was asked required human rescue. The structural proof asks "did the
planned implementation run"; it is meaningless for an authorized no-commit outcome. Exemption
narrowed by the shared `hasNonTerminalSteps` rule, so a card with unfinished work still faces
the full proof, and it waives nothing else: pre-merge approval and FN-8141's skipped-
verification guard still apply at the door.
MERGE CHECKS HAD NO RUNNER. The clean room exists to run the project's checks, and every
runner, linter and type-checker lives in devDependencies — but the install inherited an
ambient NODE_ENV=production and skipped them all. The executor said so in its own words
("the environment omitted devDependencies") and repaired itself; the clean room did not, and
its reviewer approved a merge whose tests could not run. The project already neutralizes this
for its own tests in scripts/test-changed.mjs; the lesson never reached the lane that
provisions checkouts.
pnpm lint 0 errors, test:gate green, engine typecheck clean, pipeline-smoke 93/93, and 328
tests green across the suites covering every defect reported today.
4d2b42b068