Tasks piled up in the Planning column and never moved. hasAdvancedPastPlanning
counted steps.length > 0 as proof a card had advanced past planning, but a
replan card legitimately retains the steps its previous planning pass
materialized. The still-in-planning guard therefore failed for every card
Plan Review sent back, so triage's specifyTask claim silently skipped its
status:"planning" write and re-claimed the same cards every poll — never
planning them, and starving healthy cards out of the maxTriageConcurrent
slots they held.
Steps are no longer advancement evidence while a card sits in a planner lane:
the "triage" column, and the merged "todo" planner lane used by plan-in-place
workflows when the card carries a planning status. Worktrees and
execution/terminal columns remain durable advancement evidence, preserving
FN-7977's protection against a recovery write clobbering a card that raced
ahead into execution.
The primary claim path now warns instead of returning silently; recovery-write
skips stay silent by design. The silence is why this stalled the planner for
hours undiagnosed.
Regression coverage asserts the invariant across both planner surfaces rather
than the reported repro alone: triage cards with and without an explicit
needs-replan status, plan-in-place todo replans, every parked-for-planning
status, and the advancement signals that must still fire.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
1d6a0449ce