fix(#203): the queue stalls because drift is treated as a lifecycle exit

[adnaan]

Fixes #203.

The rule: the queue drops an item only on an explicit human resolve. Never on drift.

Anchor drift is something that happens to a comment — and it is usually the agent's own edit that causes it. Treating it as a lifecycle transition meant a comment could leave the queue without anyone deciding it should, and the panel has no total, so a row leaving looked exactly like a row being finished.

Measured before the fix: eight comments, all marked done, five anchors invalidated → DoneCount = 3, want 8.

There is no cap, no batch size and no 5 anywhere in the source. Five is simply where the agent has edited enough of the document that its own edits start invalidating the anchors of the comments it has not reached yet.

Four defects, all keyed off AnchorOutdated()

• QueueState() tested AnchorOutdated() before Processed. A comment the agent had already marked done left the Done count the moment the agent's own edit broke its anchor. suggestionQueueState has always ordered it the other way and says why — "checked FIRST, since an applied suggestion is also anchor-outdated". The comment path had it backwards.
• A drifted, un-done comment returned "" — it left both the queued and the done count. It is now blocked: badged, counted, named in the legend ("N need re-anchoring"), and included in HasQueue() so the panel body cannot collapse and hide it. An accepted-but-unapplied suggestion whose target text is gone gets the same treatment.
• done --all-open sourced its ids from the agent's actionable set, which drops outdated and agent-replied comments — precisely the ones it has just finished. It skipped them, printed marked N comment(s) as worked on, and exited 0. It now marks every enqueued, unresolved comment, skips ids already marked, and says out loud what it held back.
• prereview done did not settle a comment in the agent's snapshot. actionableComments never consulted Processed, and emitSnapshot/LoadComments never loaded processed.jsonl, so the field was always false there. Every later snapshot re-handed the agent work it had already done; on a growing queue it re-chewed the front of the backlog and never reached the tail. SKILL.md has always documented the opposite. The Replies should also appear as work in Queue #164 reply override is untouched — a trailing reviewer reply still reopens a done item, and re-enqueue still returns it.

Also

SKILL.md's launch line now redirects stdout to /tmp/prereview-$$.log. Snapshots stream to stdout for the whole session; on an undrained pipe the buffer fills, the write blocks while holding the emit lock, inEmit never clears, and emission stops for good with the browser still responsive. Not observed in the wild — but the documented command was the exposed path. A write deadline on the live channel is filed separately as #215.

Verification

Full browser e2e suite green (499s, exit 0), full unit suite and go vet clean, make tmpl-check green with the signature golden regenerated — its diff was exactly the two intended insertions, and the render goldens moved only the button's title string.

Both new browser tests fail without the fix:

• TestE2E_QueueBlockedRow — queue has 0 rows, want 1 (and the legend came back empty, because HasQueue() was false and the whole panel body collapsed).
• TestE2E_QueueDoneReachesTotalAfterDrift — real binary, real browser, eight comments, --all-open, then a restructuring edit: Done = 7, want 8.

One thing worth knowing

Writing the e2e turned up something the static reading missed: a straight in-place paragraph rewrite does not produce outdated. #196's anchorEdited claims it — both neighbours still match — and it stays actionable. The bug only reproduces once the edit restructures the document (five paragraphs merged into one), which shifts the neighbours.

That is exactly what SKILL.md tells the agent to do: "drive a single, coherent change across the affected files — each comment is an input to that holistic change, not a standalone instruction." The instructions steer the agent into the edit pattern that broke its own queue.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_016NH17Zerr7gujxZUSRTQh3