🐛🧑‍💻 - Pre branch SDD ownership analysis fails without an actionable issue diagnostic or clarification card #636

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues. The earlier 🐛🧑‍💻 - bug pre branch SDD drafting fails after successful analysis with an unclassified agent exit #541 concerns draft-output truncation, whereas this failure occurs during ownership analysis before drafting or clarification publication.

Which actions are affected?

Issue

Which platforms are affected?

Linux

Description

Starting a feature issue with pre-branch SDD enabled fails after the ownership-analysis agent returns successfully. The local semantic validator rejects its proposed companion owner/path with A companion SDD requires an existing owner and a new path. The workflow then marks the issue blocked/awaiting-maintainer, but publishes no SDD work-status card, no question, no structured diagnostic describing which non-secret owner/path invariant failed, and no actionable recovery in the issue. No managed branch or SDD exists.

Failing closed is correct. The problem is that an agent-generated invalid ownership decision becomes a generic workflow failure with no usable clarification or bounded recovery. Do not relax owner/path validation or permit contributor-created replacement branches. The cause of the invalid model choice is not established because the selected fields were not safely exposed. Source inspection narrows the rejected condition to either a nonexistent catalog capability ID or a path already registered in a capability.

Reproducing the issue

1. Use an admitted feature issue in a repository with a valid version-1 capability catalog and existing owners, issue-managed-branches: true, pre-branch-sdd: true, and development branch develop.
2. The observed consumer is private vypdev/platform issue [#196] ✨ - Simplify projecturls logic #197, “Build a reproducible Supabase bootstrap and cloud development environment”. It requests an English prospective infrastructure SDD mapped to existing repository-delivery, persistence-data-lifecycle, identity-tenancy-access and production-verification capabilities.
3. Add the installed in-progress label as an authorized maintainer.
4. Inspect https://github.com/vypdev/platform/actions/runs/39566196420 (2026-10-21 08:03 UTC). The analysis agent completes successfully and parseSddPlan rejects a companion. The run fails before writeCard.
5. Observe only the welcome comment, labels SDD, in-progress, state:blocked, state:awaiting-maintainer, and no branched. No clarification card exists. There are no run artifacts.

Expected: preserve fail-closed validation, original scope, immutable base and branch ownership. Surface a safe actionable diagnostic differentiating unknown owner from registered path and show how to retry the same issue. Consider a bounded structured-analysis repair or maintainer clarification for invalid generated owner/path decisions, with tests proving no files/branches are published until valid. Do not infer a repair policy or bypass existing limits without reviewing the contract.

Consumer recovery attempt: the same issue body now explicitly selects existing catalog capability repository-delivery, existing owner specs/repository-delivery.md, and NEW companion path specs/cloud-development-environment.md. The first failed run did not expose which fields actually failed. This report does not claim that the explicit hint or retry has recovered the issue.

copilot Version

3.9.3; vypdev/copilot@v3 resolved to f7f68e699a7f7cea46e0da62388ec1a643908ae9. Runner codex-cli 0.163.0; configured planner provider/model codex/openai/gpt-6-luna.

Relevant Log Output

2026-10-21T08:03:46.138Z Agent execution started.
2026-10-21T08:03:46.159Z Agent execution admitted (codex codex-cli 0.163.0).
2026-10-21T08:03:56.046Z Agent execution completed.
2026-10-21T08:03:56.048Z Pre-branch SDD gate failed: A companion SDD requires an existing owner and a new path.
2026-10-21T08:03:58.730Z Conversation publication omitted: no explicit semantic publication intent.
2026-10-21T08:04:00.988Z Error code: workflow.failed
Retryable: Yes
Reference: df2430a9-c068-4eeb-bb18-619e7f951f16

Additional context and comments

Relevant source at the exact Action SHA: src/domain/pre_branch_sdd.ts (parseSddPlan: companion rejects !ownerPaths || registered) and src/application/usecases/sdd/pre_branch_sdd_gate_use_case.ts (begin parses analysis before writing a card; catch emits generic workflow.failed). Native schema enforces JSON shape, but cannot alone enforce catalog ownership semantics.

The consumer uses Kotlin/Gradle and Astro/Svelte in nested backend/frontend roots. This run does not demonstrate a language/framework path rejection: it fails earlier on SDD ownership. Preserve portable catalog support; do not claim runtime compatibility from successful catalog inspection. Private consumer links may require maintainer access. This report intentionally excludes source contents, credentials and raw provider output.

Regression expectations: unknown companion owner, already-registered companion path, valid companion/update/new decisions, safe issue-visible diagnostics, bounded recovery policy, no provider-output leakage, immutable catalog/base and no premature branch/readiness publication.