Bug: pulse dispatches workers for duplicate issues when feature already merged

[superdav42]

Observed behaviour

The pulse created 6 duplicate issues for the same feature (universal tax fallback) on the same day:

• fix: bound aidevops update output to prevent tool buffer overflow #426, t148: Supervisor: add review-triage phase before PR merge #437, t149: Auto-create GitHub issues when supervisor adds/dispatches tasks #455, feat(supervisor): add automatic release at batch milestones (t128.10) #460, fix(supervisor): replace log grep PR URL detection with authoritative lookup, wire adaptive concurrency (t151) #465, fix: harden VirusTotal error handling, logging, and rate-limit accounting (t147.3) #468 — all describing the same task

PR #456 merged and closed #455. The pulse then dispatched a worker against #468 (still OPEN, status:queued). The worker correctly detected the work was done and closed the issue — but only after being dispatched unnecessarily.

Root cause

Two gaps:

Gap 1 — No deduplication at issue creation time. Before gh issue create, there is no check for existing issues with similar titles. If issue-sync runs multiple times (or multiple workers each create their own issue), duplicates accumulate.

Gap 2 — Dispatch checks OPEN state but not related merged PRs. The pulse correctly skips CLOSED issues. But it does not check whether a merged PR already implements the same feature. A duplicate issue that was never linked to the merged PR stays OPEN and gets dispatched.

Proposed fixes

1. Issue creation dedup: before gh issue create in issue-sync-helper.sh and claim-task-id.sh, run gh issue list --search "<title keywords>" --state all and skip creation if a semantically similar issue exists (open or recently closed).

2. Pre-dispatch merged-PR check: in the pulse dispatch step, before assigning a worker, search for merged PRs that reference the issue's task keywords. If found, close the duplicate issue with a comment pointing to the merged PR instead of dispatching.

3. Single-issue-per-task enforcement: claim-task-id.sh should store the GH issue number atomically alongside the task ID claim, preventing a second claim from creating a second issue for the same task ID.

Evidence

• Issues: fix: bound aidevops update output to prevent tool buffer overflow #426, t148: Supervisor: add review-triage phase before PR merge #437, t149: Auto-create GitHub issues when supervisor adds/dispatches tasks #455, feat(supervisor): add automatic release at batch milestones (t128.10) #460, fix(supervisor): replace log grep PR URL detection with authoritative lookup, wire adaptive concurrency (t151) #465, fix: harden VirusTotal error handling, logging, and rate-limit accounting (t147.3) #468 (Ultimate-Multisite/ultimate-multisite) — all same feature, same day
• Merged PR: t150: Supervisor self-healing: auto-create diagnostic subtask on failure #456 (closed t149: Auto-create GitHub issues when supervisor adds/dispatches tasks #455 only)
• Wasted dispatch: worker on fix: harden VirusTotal error handling, logging, and rate-limit accounting (t147.3) #468 spent time verifying work already done

[github-actions]

Thanks for the report, @superdav42.

This issue has been queued for maintainer review. A maintainer will review it and either:

• Approve it for the development pipeline (status:available)
• Ask for more information if the report needs clarification
• Close it if it's a duplicate or out of scope

Tip: For faster, higher-quality issue reporting, use /log-issue-aidevops in your AI assistant session. It gathers diagnostics automatically and checks for duplicates.

[marcusquinn]

Pulse triage completed at 19:47 UTC. Issue has needs-maintainer-review label — skipping dispatch per protocol. Awaiting maintainer review before pipeline pickup.

[marcusquinn]

just a note, i have to be careful with these architectural requests, as it was a long battle to achieve the level of automation we have, and steer the development to use intelligence over deterministic logic, which AI tends to vear to and generates lots of fragile code in doing so