The function was calling `read_content(story_id)`, which returns the
story's *description* text (e.g. "Bug: Coder exits code 0 with
uncommitted work — force a commit-only respawn..."). It then scanned
that for "Merge conflict" / "CONFLICT (content):", which obviously
never matched, so the auto-spawn-mergemaster-on-content-conflict guard
in `pool/auto_assign/merge.rs` always saw `false` and skipped.
The actual gate output (where the merge runner stores the failure
message including conflict markers) lives at
`format!("{story_id}:gate_output")` — that's the key
`pipeline/advance/mod.rs:207` writes to. Read from there instead.
Witnessed: 954's merge hit a real `CONFLICT (content)` in
tests_regression.rs at 08:57:40, no mergemaster spawned, story stayed
in MergeFailure.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dave
c228ae1640