The field was defined in persistence and serialization, the executor's Plan
Review replan-cap park wrote it, the triage manual gate null-cleared it, and
the dashboard special-cases it (isReviewBudgetExhaustedApproval badge + detail
explanation) — but updateTask's field-by-field merge never applied the key, so
every writer silently dropped it. FN-8647's 15-cycle non-converging Plan Review
loop therefore parked with a generic 'needs approval' and no hint it was a cap
escalation.
Merge contract, pinned by tests with a measured revert proof (3/4 fail
pre-fix): set persists, explicit null clears, a status write that leaves
awaiting-approval without addressing the reason auto-clears it so an approved
or replanned card cannot carry a stale escalation reason into its next park,
and unrelated updates leave it untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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