# Problems

Recurring issues observed during pipeline operation. Review periodically and create stories for systemic problems.

## 2026-03-18: Stories graduating to "done" with empty merges (7 of 10)

Pipeline allows stories to move through coding → QA → merge → done without any actual code changes landing on master. The squash-merge produces an empty diff but the pipeline still marks the story as done. Affected stories: 247, 273, 274, 278, 279, 280, 92. Only 266, 271, 277, and 281 actually shipped code. Root cause: no check that the merge commit contains a non-empty diff. Filed bug 283 for the manual_qa gate issue specifically, but the empty-merge-to-done problem is broader and needs its own fix.

## 2026-03-18: Agent committed directly to master instead of worktree

Multiple agents have committed directly to master instead of their worktree/feature branch:

- Commit `5f4591f` ("fix: update should_commit_stage test to match 5_done") — likely mergemaster
- Commit `a32cfbd` ("Add bot-level command registry with help command") — story 285 coder committed code + Cargo.lock directly to master

Agents should only commit to their feature branch or merge-queue branch, never to master directly. Suspect agents are running `git commit` in the project root instead of the worktree directory. This can also revert uncommitted fixes on master (e.g. project.toml pkill fix was overwritten). Frequency: at least 2 confirmed cases. This is a recurring and serious problem — needs a guard in the server or agent prompts.

## 2026-03-19: Auto-assign re-assigns mergemaster to failed merge stories in a loop

After bug 295 fix (`auto_assign_available_work` after every pipeline advance), mergemaster gets re-assigned to stories that already have a merge failure flag. Story 310 had an empty diff merge failure — mergemaster correctly reported the failure, but auto-assign immediately re-assigned mergemaster to the same story, creating an infinite retry loop. The auto-assign logic needs to check for the `merge_failure` front matter flag before re-assigning agents to stories in `4_merge/`.

## 2026-03-19: Coder produces no code (complete ghost — story 310)

Story 310 (Bot delete command) went through the full pipeline — coder session ran, passed QA/gates, moved to merge — but the coder produced zero code. No commits on the feature branch, no commits on master. The entire agent session was a no-op. This is different from the "committed to master instead of worktree" problem — in this case, the coder simply did nothing. Need to investigate the coder logs to understand what happened. The empty-diff merge check would catch this at merge time, but ideally the server should detect "coder finished with no commits on feature branch" at the gate-check stage and fail early.

## 2026-03-19: Auto-assign assigns mergemaster to coding-stage stories

Auto-assign picked mergemaster for story 310 which was in `2_current/`. Mergemaster should only work on stories in `4_merge/`. The `auto_assign_available_work` function doesn't enforce that the agent's configured stage matches the pipeline stage of the story it's being assigned to. Story 279 (auto-assign respects agent stage from front matter) was supposed to fix this, but the check may only apply to front-matter preferences, not the fallback assignment path.
