## Two heartbeat sites asked "is this task finished?" with the legacy
ids
`agent-heartbeat.ts` **4 → 0**. Neither site is cosmetic.
**Linked-task clear.** The heartbeat clears an agent's assignment once
its card is finished. Keyed on the literals, an agent on a renamed board
stayed bound to a **completed** card indefinitely — every later
heartbeat ran with stale task context instead of picking up new work,
and nothing else clears it.
**Worktree-acquisition gate.** Its failure bookkeeping runs only for a
**non-terminal** task. A card in a renamed complete lane read as
non-terminal, so an acquisition failure could stamp `status: "failed"`
and an error message onto work that was **already done**.
That second site *writes*, which drives the fallback direction: an
unresolvable workflow degrades toward "terminal", because treating a
finished card as unfinished is the expensive mistake here.
Both sit in async paths — the first has `await taskStore.getTask(...)`
three lines above — so this is an `await`, not a restructure. Extracted
to one predicate rather than converted twice: they are the same
question, and the two must not drift when one of them acts
destructively.
## How this was found, and the part worth recording
Generalising #2767. That PR marked a documented false positive the
census kept advertising, so I swept for **other** files whose lifecycle
literals were reasoned about in prose but still counted — to find out
whether the trap was systemic.
**It is not.** Of twelve candidate files, only this one carried real
unconverted guards, and its "false positive" mentions turned out to be
unrelated (detection heuristics, not column literals). The sweep mostly
came back **negative**, and that is worth saying so nobody repeats it
expecting a haul.
## Revert proof
| reverted | result |
|---|---|
| neuter the resolution (predicate → literals) | **3 failed** / 2 passed
|
| shipped | **5 passed** |
The two that survive the revert are the degraded-mode pair, which is
correct — they assert the *legacy* answer, so they must pass either way.
One case also pins that a legacy `done` id is **not** terminal on a
board that does not declare it, which is what a board-wide union would
get wrong.
## Verification
- 13 heartbeat suites — **501 passed** (496 before, +5 new)
- `pnpm test:gate` — **158 / 10 / 487 / 71** · `pnpm lint` clean ·
engine `tsc --noEmit` **0 errors** · `--strict` exits 0
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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