Track backlog simplification and Ruby maintenance priorities

Companion tracker: agent-coordination #315.

This maintainer-requested tracker preserves the backlog complexity audit and the recommended order of work. Existing issues and PRs remain the implementation records; this issue consolidates decisions and progress.

The audit covered every open issue and PR in the September 9 snapshot, including issues without PRs. Labels were applied and read back successfully. The audit is a prioritization assessment, not a current-head merge approval. Status updates below were checked September 10, 2026; recheck linked items before acting.

How to use the labels

• complexity:simplify: removes or consolidates ongoing code, concepts, obligations, or operational work.
• complexity:neutral: preserves roughly the same maintenance surface.
• complexity:complexify: adds a maintenance surface. A necessary correctness repair can still belong here; this is not an automatic rejection.
• P1 / P2 / P3: relative priority in the audited backlog, not permission to merge.
• triage:drain-first: bounded existing work worth finishing; triage:simplify-next: reserve cleanup capacity; triage:needs-scope: narrow before implementation; triage:reconcile: compare with shipped work or competing approaches; triage:park: defer pending concrete evidence of value.

Optimize for fewer maintainer interventions and less repeated work, rather than the number of PRs merged. File overlap warrants integration review; it does not automatically establish a semantic dependency. Preserve existing approvals and ownership when reconciling the backlog.

Completed

• Audit and label 184 items: 58 PRs and 126 issues, including their relationships and issues without PRs.
• Classify 39 as simplify, 48 as neutral, and 97 as complexify.
• #808 merged: separate integration checks from full release verification.
• #816 completed through merged #818: make ordinary PR closeout lightweight.

Recommended order and remaining decisions

1. Cap the drain phase. Finish bounded closeout for #804 and the remaining #811 work after merged #808. Reconcile #708 and #706 / #703 where review, QA, and target instructions disagree. This is not a requirement to clear every open PR before simplification.
2. Retain concrete safety repairs without creating universal gates. #799 has trust-boundary and deduplication value. Preserve the needed behavior in #700 and #717; #799 removes an insertion point used by #717, so adapt the surviving implementation. #814 can preempt the queue if it addresses demonstrated active false-stale blockage, but is not a prerequisite for everything else.
3. Make retirement decisions now. Recommend stopping rebases and not merging #469 / #665 as-is. Preserve minimal acceptance cases, the real #249 defect, and a replacement owner/scope before retiring the unwanted architecture. Do not require equivalence to unwanted architecture. For #643, compare only the residual behavior after closed #522 and shipped #439; full equivalence has not been established. Reconcile #790 against merged #792, #403 against #425, and the contract portion of #480 against #705. Remaining scope must be evaluated separately.
4. Reserve skill simplification capacity. With #816 / #818 shipped, continue #781 and verify adoption of the lighter closeout behavior. Decide which obligations survive before building more receipts, writers, or validators around them. Narrow #575 to the useful short-prompt need in #476; avoid adding a ledger, digest, and exact-prose checker merely to support it.
5. Refactor Ruby in bounded, settled areas under #309. #659 can consolidate process-group handling across three existing callers after the surviving #288 / #655 semantics settle. Extract parser phases in #631, then remove open-ended word lists in #632. Revisit #645 after deciding which receipt values are retained. #735 can remove full-home copying in favor of a managed-path snapshot for the observed upgrade failure, after installer overlap review. #692 is a lint baseline, not completion of the Ruby refactor.
6. Park expansion until it earns its maintenance cost. Broad budget/task-control work in #426 / #458, release lifecycle machinery in #809, the custom JavaScript parser in #696, prompt interpretation in #697, and broader launcher/capacity/provenance/telemetry machinery should not displace the cleanup slot. Retain the bounded approved #523 repair without reviving the whole historical program.

Progress checklist

• Resolve the capped drain set and record any residual blockers on the owning items.
• Record explicit keep/narrow/retire decisions for the overlapping large PRs.
• Complete the retained #781 skill cleanup and remove obsolete obligations rather than relocating them.
• Deliver bounded #309 refactors with behavior preserved and duplicate code removed.
• Revisit parked work only when an observed need justifies its added maintenance cost.

#809 is not a prerequisite for #808, and #816 was not a prerequisite for #811. Cross-references and ordering suggestions from the audit must not be converted wholesale into an executable dependency graph.

Scope and evidence limits

The original source snapshot contained 89 production Ruby files / 45,015 lines and 36 SKILL.md files / 6,697 lines; 12 production Ruby files exceeded 1,000 lines. These historical counts include comments and blank lines and precede subsequent merges. They identify review targets, not a quality score. Stacked PR diffs must not be summed as independent growth. The substantive objective is fewer concepts, duplicated rules, parsing paths, and maintenance obligations.

Complete audited inventory

This table preserves the original audit classifications. It is a historical snapshot, not a statement that every item remains open. The progress section above incorporates later verified merges; linked items and current labels govern subsequent work.

Completion condition

Close this tracker when the bounded drain and cleanup decisions above have durable outcomes on their owning items. Completion does not require merging every audited PR or implementing parked proposals.

September 10 follow-up: approved fixture repair

• #823 is the canonical, approved repair for temporary-pack hardlink races in the two stack fixture clone constructors. Prioritize it as P1, complexity:neutral, triage:drain-first: it reduces repeated CI work with a small change to existing fixture behavior.
• Keep this repair separate from #249 and the existing #813 / #814 scope. The existing coordinator owns implementation assignment; this tracker creates no additional lane.
• Controlled reproduction supports the mechanism and committed identity preservation. The actual hosted writer and full-suite cost remain unknown; require hosted evidence before marking that failure resolved.

No specific production file or test is named; start by reading the bounded Ruby work in #309 and its referenced items (#659, #631, #632, #645, and #735). Check each owning issue before acting, and consider the tracker complete only when explicit keep, narrow, or retire decisions are recorded and the retained refactors preserve behavior while removing duplicate code.