Recovery: Stale Lane Seed After Re-Finalizing Tasks

spec-kitty agent action implement WP## fails with:

Workspace allocation failed: cannot auto-merge the recorded planning commit
'<sha>' into lane '<lane>': the merge conflicts.

Why this happens

You committed MORE planning commits (for example, a post-tasks-squad fold) after finalize-tasks already created the coord/lane branches. implement seeds the lane from finalize's OLD commit, so the new planning commit and the lane's seed diverge.

No shipped --fix for this case — and one to avoid

spec-kitty doctor coordination --fix looks like the obvious candidate but is the wrong tool here: it walks and rewrites meta.json for every mission under kitty-specs/, not just the one you are fixing, and it only repairs a coord branch that was never created — not one that is valid but stale-seeded. Reach for it only when you intend a repo-wide sweep; if you run it by mistake, restore the unrelated missions with git checkout -- kitty-specs/.

Manual fix: flatten this mission only

(spec-kitty doctor coordination prints the exact .worktrees/<mission>-<mid8>-coord path for your mission — use that instead of hand-constructing it.)

git worktree remove .worktrees/<mission>-lane-a --force
git worktree remove .worktrees/<mission>-<mid8>-coord --force
git branch -D kitty/mission-<mission>-lane-a kitty/mission-<mission>

Edit kitty-specs/<mission>/meta.json to drop coordination, then commit:

{
  "coordination_branch": null,
  "topology": "lanes"
}

Re-bootstrap status on the flattened topology and re-prepare the lanes:

spec-kitty agent mission finalize-tasks --mission <handle>
spec-kitty agent action implement WP## --mission <handle> --agent <agent>

Better: don't re-run finalize-tasks after a post-tasks fold — fold squad findings before the mutating finalize call, or accept the flatten dance above.

False sparse-checkout guard. implement refuses and points at spec-kitty doctor sparse-checkout --fix, even when git config core.sparseCheckout is already false and 100% of files are present — a stale .git/info/sparse-checkout leftover. doctor sparse-checkout --fix itself needs an interactive TTY and fails in a headless/CI shell. Skip it and pass the escape hatch instead — this is a genuine false positive, not a real sparse-checkout state:

spec-kitty agent action implement WP## --mission <handle> --agent <agent> --allow-sparse-checkout

Sync-fan-out hang. implement / move-task can hang on the SaaS sync tail after the local claim has already persisted. Wrap the call:

SPEC_KITTY_SYNC_DISABLE=1 spec-kitty agent action implement WP## --mission <handle> --agent <agent>

The worktree and claim are already done by the time it hangs; disabling sync just lets the command return.

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