simplification-debt: .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh exceeds 2000 lines

[milohiss]

What

Simplify .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh — currently over 2000 lines. Break into smaller, focused modules.

Why

Issue #18914 is blocked by the large-file gate. Workers dispatched against this file spend most of their context budget reading it, leaving insufficient capacity for implementation.

How

• EDIT: .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh
• Extract cohesive function groups into separate files
• Keep a thin orchestrator in the original file that sources/imports the extracted modules
• Verify: wc -l .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh should be below 2000

Created by large-file simplification gate (pulse-dispatch-core.sh)

[github-actions]

Thanks for the report, @milohiss.

This issue has been queued for maintainer review. A maintainer will review it and either:

• Approve it using: sudo aidevops approve issue 18916
• Ask for more information if the report needs clarification
• Close it if it's a duplicate or out of scope

Tip: For faster, higher-quality issue reporting, use /log-issue-aidevops in your AI assistant session. It gathers diagnostics automatically and checks for duplicates.

[milohiss]

Automated triage could not produce a review

The pulse attempted to post an automated triage review on this issue 1 time(s) but every attempt was suppressed by the safety filter. The content-hash cache has now been written to stop the lock/unlock churn, which means this issue will no longer appear in the automated triage queue until its body or comments change.

What went wrong

• Reason: Worker produced output but it did not contain a ## Review header (safety filter suppressed the post).
• Last attempt output size: 3121 chars
• Failure tag: no-review-header

What a maintainer should do

1. Review manually — run /review-issue-pr 18916 in an interactive session, or open the issue and evaluate it by hand.

2. Force a retry (optional) — delete the cache entry to let the next pulse cycle re-attempt:

   rm -f ~/.aidevops/.agent-workspace/tmp/triage-cache/marcusquinn_aidevops-18916.hash
   gh issue edit 18916 --repo marcusquinn/aidevops --remove-label triage-failed

3. Fix the worker (if this keeps happening) — huge headerless outputs usually mean the triage-review agent prompt needs tightening. See .agents/workflows/triage-review.md.

This escalation was posted automatically by _post_triage_escalation_comment in pulse-ancillary-dispatch.sh (t2016) because the retry budget was exhausted without a visible review.

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aidevops.sh v3.8.24 with pulse-triage Overall, 6m since this issue was created.

[milohiss]

Review: Approved

Issue Validation

Check	Status	Notes
Reproducible	Yes	Large-file gate trigger is deterministic; wc -l is the evidence
Not duplicate	Yes	#18914 is the blocked downstream issue, not a duplicate; RECENT_CLOSED shows no prior split of this file
Actual bug	Yes	Valid simplification-debt; large-file gate is intentional infrastructure, and triggering it is the finding
In scope	Yes	Repo has a consistent pattern of decomposing oversized scripts (GH#18680, #18690, #18699 all closed recently)

Root Cause: dispatch-dedup-helper.sh has grown past the 2000-line large-file gate threshold, causing workers dispatched against it (e.g., for #18914) to exhaust context budget on reading before reaching implementation. The automated simplification gate in pulse-dispatch-core.sh detected and filed this correctly.

Scope & Recommendation

• Scope creep: Low
• Complexity tier: tier:standard
• Decision: APPROVE
• Recommended labels: tier:standard, refactor, status:queued
• Implementation guidance:
  • Before extracting, map cohesion boundaries by function group (e.g., lock acquisition, dedup checking, assignment normalization, stale recovery) — the AGENTS.md combined-signal rule ((active status label) AND (non-self assignee)) is referenced as a critical invariant and must remain co-located or explicitly exported with clear semantics after the split.
  • Follow the thin-orchestrator pattern used in GH#18682 (dispatch_enrichment_workers) and GH#18690 (_normalize_unassign_stale): one sourcing file, cohesive extracted modules, no circular sourcing.
  • Verify with shellcheck on all produced files and confirm wc -l .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh is below 2000 before closing; also run the existing test harness (.agents/scripts/tests/test-dispatch-dedup-multi-operator.sh, 7 assertions) to confirm no regression in dedup logic.

[marcusquinn]

Resolved

PR #18955 merged.

What was done: Extracted two cohesive subsystems from dispatch-dedup-helper.sh into separate sourced modules:

• dispatch-dedup-stale.sh (381 lines) — stale assignment recovery (GH#15060, t2008, GH#18816)
• dispatch-dedup-pr.sh (268 lines) — PR evidence dedup checks (t2085)

Result: dispatch-dedup-helper.sh reduced from 1878 → 1217 lines. Well below the 2000-line gate.

Files changed: .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-helper.sh, .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-stale.sh (new), .agents/scripts/dispatch-dedup-pr.sh (new)

Testing: shellcheck zero violations, subcommands smoke-tested, all existing tests use subprocess calls so no test changes needed.

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aidevops.sh v3.8.24 plugin for OpenCode v1.4.3 with claude-sonnet-4-6 spent 13m and 33,618 tokens on this with the user in an interactive session. Solved in 8h 14m.

[github-actions]

Completed via PR #18955. merged to main.