chore(engine): one maintainer-association predicate, with a guard against the ninth copy

[JSONbored]

Toward #9860 (candidate class: hand-maintained lists). Follow-up to #9877.

What verifying #9877's merge turned up

#9877 consolidated five spellings of ["OWNER", "MEMBER", "COLLABORATOR"]. Checking that the merge landed intact, I grepped for the literal again and found three more — so the real count was eight:

Site	Note
packages/loopover-engine/src/scoring/pending-pr-scenarios.ts	Its own comment: "Duplicated here (rather than imported) because this package cannot reach into src/; keep the two in sync by hand." That reason expired the moment #9877 moved the definition into the engine.
src/services/contributor-evidence-graph.ts	Spelled with .toUpperCase()
src/services/outcome-calibration.ts	Found by the new guard, not by me — on its first run

Two of the eight had already drifted: one compared case-sensitively, one case-insensitively. That is how a copy stops being a copy, and it is the argument for a checker rather than another sweep.

The one that isn't membership

packages/loopover-engine/src/signals/engine.ts's strongestAssociation depends on the list's order (OWNER > MEMBER > COLLABORATOR), not on membership. It iterates the shared constant now and says so in a comment, so the ordering dependency is explicit rather than implied by a re-typed literal.

The guard

scripts/check-maintainer-association-copies.ts, wired into test:ci. Per #9860's own bar — compute the fact, don't remember it — it greps for the three-value maintainer subset rather than listing known offenders, and fails with the import to use:

Found 1 re-typed maintainer-association literal(s) (#9860):
  src/services/outcome-calibration.ts:79 — const MAINTAINER_AUTHOR_ASSOCIATIONS = new Set([...]);

Import from packages/loopover-engine/src/settings/author-association.ts instead:
  isMaintainerAuthorAssociation(association)  — membership, case-insensitive
  MAINTAINER_AUTHOR_ASSOCIATIONS             — the list, in precedence order
  classifyAuthorAssociation(association)     — maintainer | contributor | unknown

It deliberately does not flag z.enum declarations of GitHub's full eight-value vocabulary (CONTRIBUTOR, FIRST_TIMER, MANNEQUIN, NONE, …). Those are a wire schema, not this predicate, and the contract legitimately declares that enum four times — conflating the two would be its own mistake. That exclusion is tested.

Behaviour note

pending-pr-scenarios.ts and outcome-calibration.ts were case-sensitive; the shared predicate is case-insensitive and trims. GitHub always sends upper-case, so this is a widening with no practical change — and it removes a latent mismatch where a lower-cased stored value would have been missed by two of the eight and caught by the other six.

Validation

• 6 new unit tests on the guard itself, against a synthetic tree so both halves are pinned: what it must catch (any quoting/spacing), and what it must not (the full-vocabulary enum, the definition module). One asserts it passes on the real repository, which is the point of wiring it into test:ci.
• 280 unit tests across the touched modules pass; the engine's own suite is 911 pass / 0 fail.
• maintainer-associations:check, engine-parity:drift-check, dead-exports:check, dead-source-files:check, import-specifiers:check, docs:drift-check, db:migrations:check, tsc --noEmit, git diff --check all clean.

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Status	Name	Latest Commit	Preview URL	Updated (UTC)
✅ Deployment successful! View logs	loopover-ui	7f9b7f0	Commit Preview URL Branch Preview URL	Jul 30 2026, 05:39 PM

[codecov]

Bundle Report

Bundle size has no change ✅

[codecov]

Codecov Report

❌ Patch coverage is 96.00000% with 1 line in your changes missing coverage. Please review.
✅ Project coverage is 91.88%. Comparing base (8248b88) to head (7f9b7f0).
⚠️ Report is 3 commits behind head on main.
✅ All tests successful. No failed tests found.

Files with missing lines	Patch %	Lines
packages/loopover-engine/src/signals/engine.ts	92.30%	0 Missing and 1 partial ⚠️

Additional details and impacted files

@@           Coverage Diff           @@
##             main    #9932   +/-   ##
=======================================
  Coverage   91.88%   91.88%           
=======================================
  Files         923      923           
  Lines      113407   113391   -16     
  Branches    27332    27325    -7     
=======================================
- Hits       104205   104191   -14     
+ Misses       7915     7913    -2     
  Partials     1287     1287           

Flag	Coverage Δ
backend	95.69% <95.45%> (-0.01%)	⬇️
engine	72.36% <87.50%> (-0.01%)	⬇️

Flags with carried forward coverage won't be shown. Click here to find out more.

Files with missing lines	Coverage Δ
...oopover-engine/src/scoring/pending-pr-scenarios.ts	57.91% <100.00%> (-0.42%)	⬇️
...oopover-engine/src/signals/issue-quality-report.ts	100.00% <100.00%> (ø)
...opover-engine/src/signals/predicted-gate-engine.ts	86.68% <100.00%> (-0.04%)	⬇️
src/services/contributor-evidence-graph.ts	99.56% <100.00%> (ø)
src/services/control-panel-roles.ts	100.00% <100.00%> (ø)
src/services/outcome-calibration.ts	98.52% <100.00%> (-0.03%)	⬇️
src/services/recommendation-outcomes.ts	99.17% <100.00%> (ø)
packages/loopover-engine/src/signals/engine.ts	97.67% <92.30%> (-0.01%)	⬇️

[JSONbored]

The blocker is correct, and the miss was in the guard rather than only in the migration. Fixed in the latest push — thank you, this was the right catch.

What was wrong

MAINTAINER_TRIPLE only matched comma-separated array literals, so it could never have found

function isMaintainerAssociation(value: string | null | undefined): boolean {
  return value === "OWNER" || value === "MEMBER" || value === "COLLABORATOR";
}

which was sitting in signals/engine.ts with 14 call sites — in the same file whose strongestAssociation I did migrate. A guard that recognises one spelling of the thing it guards is a hand-maintained list with extra steps, which is exactly what #9860 says to reject.

What changed

Detection is now "all three named within a 4-line window" — form-agnostic, and it survives a formatter wrapping a chain across lines.

Widening it immediately surfaced four more genuine copies that nothing had flagged, none of which I had found by reading:

File	Form
signals/issue-quality-report.ts	identical ===/|| chain
signals/predicted-gate-engine.ts	identical chain
services/control-panel-roles.ts	identical chain
services/recommendation-outcomes.ts	same predicate inside isMaintainerLane

So the real count was thirteen, not eight. All are migrated.

One site deliberately not migrated

settings/command-authorization.ts names all three but is not this predicate:

if (args.commenterAssociation === "OWNER" || args.commenterAssociation === "MEMBER") roles.push("maintainer");
if (args.commenterAssociation === "COLLABORATOR") roles.push("collaborator");

COLLABORATOR is a separate role there. Collapsing it into the maintainer predicate would grant collaborators maintainer-only commands — a privilege escalation, not a cleanup. It is allowlisted in ALLOWED_DISTINCT_SEMANTICS with that reason, following check-regate-sort-key.ts's ALLOWED_OMISSIONS idiom. That is an exception list with stated reasons, not a list of known duplicates awaiting migration — the distinction #9860 draws.

Also fixed

The guard printed the window's first line, which is often a closing brace or blank, instead of the line that actually names an association. Its output was unreadable in exactly the case it was built for.

Validation

• 11 guard tests (up from 6), including the ===/|| chain, a formatter-wrapped chain, the allowlisted different-semantics case, and one asserting the reported line is the one naming an association. The windowing trade-off — two hits inside one window collapse to one finding — is now stated in a test rather than left implicit.
• Engine suite 911 pass / 0 fail; 124 tests across the touched modules pass.
• maintainer-associations:check, engine-parity:drift-check, dead-exports:check, import-specifiers:check, docs:drift-check, tsc --noEmit, git diff --check all clean.