Tech-debt tracker — non-blocking follow-ups

[SSFSKIM]

arkho-board:ticket:11 — mirrored from the Arkho board.
Read-only. Edits here are reverted; closing this issue does not close the ticket. The board is the source of truth.
Board ticket: https://arkho-board-service.onrender.com/ui/t/11

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standing tracker (migrated from gh#26); items land here instead of getting lost, worked when batched

Migrated 2026-08-24 from GitHub issue #26 (first-consumer migration — the dp board now lives on the Arkho board API; the gh issue is closed with a pointer here).

The parent for non-blocking follow-ups on the doperpowers plugin itself (same shape as the consumer-repo tech-debt sink: review findings and known costs that don't block a merge land here instead of getting lost).

Open items

(none)

Closed items

• tests/qa-loops/test-review-engine.sh — decision (delegated): review-engine.sh is live and load-bearing for the qa-loops loop on main (PR requesting-review: split the review job out of codex-companion, runtime fail-closed, engine script retired #55's retirement is stale against pre-rename paths), so the suite was rebuilt, not deleted — and re-pinned at the seam the engine owns. It now stubs node and asserts the with-effort.mjs command line the engine composes (verb routing, defaults, lens contract), the env recipe, rc mapping, and the sandbox fail-closed check; the app-server thread protocol stays pinned in tests/codex-companion/ against the protocol-speaking fake codex, so a future transport change can no longer rot this suite. Zero real-node dependency; mutation-checked ×3. Landed in PR Worker-orbit maintenance: unforgeable triage dedup, broker self-reap, review-engine suite re-pin #82.
• Retired-worker sessions linger in the harness session list — closed as upstream-blocked (delegated judgment). The investigation stands: the purge tier already exists (daemon-retire.sh <id> purge), claude agents exposes no delete verb, and an age-gated registry GC would cost the retired-worker audit trail while fixing nothing the report complained about. Nothing buildable in this repo can act, so the checklist line only masquerades as work; the session-list ask belongs upstream (Claude Code). If registry metadata volume ever becomes its own problem — distinct from the session list — that is a fresh, differently-motivated item. Original context: the 2026-07-19 launchd-cwd incident left 20 retired 490-* metas and 9 retired review-pr-574 metas.
• board snapshot caching — a dispatching tick runs ~3 full-board GraphQL snapshots per ticket #25 — board snapshot caching. Already fixed on main before this tracker was swept: _board.py carries a per-process memo plus an opt-in cross-process file cache (BOARD_SNAPSHOT_CACHE), invalidated after every spawn, covered by tests/issue-tracker/test-snapshot-cache.sh. Closed 2026-08-21.
• test gap: hermetic case for the normalize-owners-before-bind preflight #24 — hermetic test for the normalize-owners-before-bind preflight. Landed in tech-debt: hermetic normalize-owners case, two non-hermetic suites, engine:claude wording (dp#24, dp#26) #79, both directions (finished owner → bind succeeds; live owner → bind refuses and the reviewer is retired), mutation-checked.
• tests/qa-loops/test-review-dispatch.sh — the review-pr-3 fixed-string assertion that matched the suite's own checkout path. Landed in tech-debt: hermetic normalize-owners case, two non-hermetic suites, engine:claude wording (dp#24, dp#26) #79.
• tests/issue-tracker/test-board-scripts.sh — the timing-flaky lock-wait race, now a marker handoff instead of a 1.0s timer. Landed in tech-debt: hermetic normalize-owners case, two non-hermetic suites, engine:claude wording (dp#24, dp#26) #79.
• skills/issue-tracker/SKILL.md — the engine:claude "redundant" claim, now qualified against the WORKER_ENGINE override. Landed in tech-debt: hermetic normalize-owners case, two non-hermetic suites, engine:claude wording (dp#24, dp#26) #79.
• tests/issue-tracker/test-board-scripts.sh — board-map.sh --write discarded its rc, making the intermittent interactive-preferred failure undiagnosable. Landed in tech-debt: hermetic normalize-owners case, two non-hermetic suites, engine:claude wording (dp#24, dp#26) #79.
• tests/claude-code/test-subagent-driven-development.sh — model capitalization drift; fixed 2026-07-28 by making the semantic-presence assertions case-insensitive.

Conventions

• One child issue per item once it's actionable; a checklist line is enough while it's just a known cost.
• This issue carries the tech-debt label so review tooling that looks for the standing tech-debt sink finds it.