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+# Reviewer dispatch concurrency — accepted-risk decision (OSWE-257)
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-05 · **Repository state reviewed:** `123f6c3f` (post-OSWE-258) ·
+**Status:** accepted risk; runtime acceptance criteria waived
+
+## Decision
+
+Do not add dispatch coordination for the residual reviewer races owned by OSWE-257. The ticket's
+runtime ordering, lifecycle, and dispatch-boundary regression criteria are formally and totally
+waived. No partial guard, lock, sequencing state, or handler-specific mitigation is being shipped.
+
+The exposure is real, but production evidence reported on the ticket found zero occurrences during
+roughly twenty-four hours of hostile dogfooding across five pull requests. The in-process windows
+can expand to seconds or minutes while awaited GitHub and LangGraph operations time out or retry
+under latency and rate limiting. Delayed or redelivered older push webhooks are rare. Stale-head
+races have a verified retrigger recovery; lifecycle races are recovered by clearing watch. That
+risk does not justify a new durable dispatch subsystem with broader correctness and operational
+failure modes.
+
+## Residual failure modes
+
+At the reviewed commit, automatic first review and watched-push review both write reviewer-thread
+metadata, create an `Open SWE Review` check, and create an interrupting reviewer run:
+
+- `_dispatch_first_review_from_pr_payload` in `agent/webhooks/github.py` confirms the recorded head,
+  watch state, and check ownership before check creation and dispatch. A newer push can complete its
+  own dispatch after that confirmation but before the older path creates its check and run; the
+  older arrival can then replace check ownership and interrupt the newer run.
+- `process_github_push_event` in `agent/webhooks/github.py` has the mirror-image gap after recording
+  the pushed head and before dispatch. Concurrent producers therefore still resolve by run-creation
+  arrival, not by head freshness.
+- A close or ineligible draft transition can land after first-review refresh or confirmation. A
+  later stale watch write can overwrite the lifecycle update, or dispatch can follow the update
+  from a stale snapshot.
+- Since OSWE-258 correctly made the push payload's `after` SHA authoritative, a delayed or
+  redelivered webhook for an older push can record the head backward, create a stale-commit check,
+  and interrupt the current-head review.
+
+OSWE-252 narrows the first-review window with refresh and pre-dispatch stand-down. OSWE-251's
+reviewed-head dedupe and run-scoped check ownership, OSWE-255's per-dispatch event classification,
+and OSWE-258's authoritative pushed-head behavior remain unchanged.
+
+## Rejected coordination designs
+
+### Process-local per-thread lock
+
+A process-local lock cannot coordinate separate webhook workers and cannot cover delayed or
+redelivered deliveries at all. Holding it across the awaited metadata, GitHub check, and run
+creation calls would also introduce head-of-line blocking and lock-lifecycle failure modes for a
+race not observed to occur.
+
+### Thread-metadata monotonic guard
+
+Reviewer thread metadata updates are last-write-wins. The LangGraph thread metadata API has no
+compare-and-set operation, so an atomic monotonic-head read/modify/write guard cannot be built on
+that state. Another read followed by another write only moves the same race.
+
+### Post-dispatch self-verification
+
+This does not satisfy the ordering guarantee. `multitask_strategy="interrupt"` takes effect when the
+stale run is created, so the stale dispatcher has already interrupted the newer run before it can
+re-read metadata and cancel itself. Cancellation cannot restore the victim. Re-dispatching the
+interrupted newer run would be resurrection machinery with its own ownership, duplication, and
+failure semantics, not a guard.
+
+### Durable dispatch arbiter or queue
+
+A durable per-PR decision point could serialize producers, but making it complete would require a
+new subsystem that receives every first-review, push, and lifecycle event; validates authoritative
+PR eligibility and head state; owns check creation; and launches or restores reviewer runs. That is
+materially larger than the observed and recoverable exposure. A partial arbiter would leave one of
+the ticket's three vectors open and is therefore explicitly rejected.
+
+## Operational detection and recovery
+
+### Stale-head ordering vectors
+
+The characteristic symptom is the current PR head wearing an incomplete or failed
+`Open SWE Review` check while a review was published against an older head. This typically
+appears as a blocked merge with all unrelated required checks green. Correlating the reviewer
+thread metadata, check commit, and published review commit should show the head/check ownership
+moving backward or an older dispatch arriving after the current-head dispatch.
+
+Recovery is to retrigger review for the current pull-request head. The current reviewed-head,
+check-ownership, and per-dispatch classification behavior then establishes a fresh current-head
+check and review.
+
+### Lifecycle vector
+
+The characteristic symptom is a closed or ineligible-draft pull request whose reviewer thread has
+`watch=true`, possibly with a review or check created after the lifecycle transition. This does not
+present as an older-head review and must not be recovered by retriggering review, which would launch
+another unwanted review and keep watching enabled.
+
+Recovery is to restore the intended lifecycle state by clearing the reviewer thread's watch flag.
+Treat any review or check produced after the close or ineligible-draft transition as noise on a pull
+request that should not have been reviewed.
+
+Reopen this decision if any of the following occurs:
+
+- one confirmed production occurrence of either signature;
+- evidence that its frequency or recovery cost is rising; or
+- the platform gains an appropriate ordering primitive, such as compare-and-set for thread
+  metadata, that can enforce monotonic ownership without a new arbiter subsystem.
+
+## Formal waiver
+
+For OSWE-257, the following acceptance criteria are waived rather than implemented:
+
+- superseded-head dispatches are not guaranteed to avoid interrupting, replacing, or taking check
+  ownership from newer-head dispatches;
+- close or draft transitions in the final startup gap are not guaranteed to prevent a subsequent
+  stale-snapshot dispatch; and
+- no new dispatch-boundary regression tests are added for those waived behaviors.
+
+The OSWE-251 reviewed-head/check-ownership guarantees and OSWE-255 per-dispatch classification
+remain in force and are intentionally untouched. This record is the complete OSWE-257 deliverable.