## Thinking Path
> - Paperclip is the open source control plane people use to manage AI
agents for work.
> - Backend execution safety is part of the control plane contract:
agents must stop at budget hard limits, stale execution paths must not
create duplicate live work, and checkout ownership must remain
authoritative.
> - The recovery branch bundled these release-gate checks with broader
unrelated work.
> - Reviewers need a narrow PR that isolates only the backend safety
behavior and regression coverage.
> - This pull request keeps budget incident creation idempotent so
repeated evaluation does not duplicate release-gate telemetry or
approvals.
> - It also adds focused coverage for idle timer skips, stale queued-run
behavior, and live checkout conflict preservation.
> - The benefit is a smaller, reviewable release-gate slice for budget
hard stops, stale execution recovery, and ownership-safe issue mutation.
## Linked Issues or Issue Description
Refs #8866
This PR extracts a focused backend safety slice from the closed broad
recovery PR. The underlying problem is that release-gate behavior needs
direct regression coverage before review: budget hard stops should not
duplicate incidents/logging on repeated evaluation, timer wakes should
respect the no-actionable-work skip policy, stale queued runs should
remain invalidated, and active checkout ownership must survive
conflicting checkout attempts without side effects.
## What Changed
- Made budget incident creation report whether an incident was newly
created, so soft/hard threshold activity logs are emitted once per
incident window.
- Added embedded Postgres budget release-gate tests covering soft
incident idempotency, hard-stop pause/cancel behavior, budget override
resume behavior, and telemetry redaction.
- Added heartbeat coverage for skipping generic timer wakes when the
agent opts into `skipTimerWhenNoActionableWork`, while preserving
legacy/proactive timer behavior.
- Added stale execution lock route coverage proving a conflicting
checkout returns `409` without overwriting live checkout or execution
ownership and without writing checkout activity.
## Verification
- `./node_modules/.bin/vitest run
server/src/__tests__/budgets-service.test.ts
server/src/__tests__/heartbeat-process-recovery.test.ts
server/src/__tests__/heartbeat-stale-queue-invalidation.test.ts
server/src/__tests__/issue-stale-execution-lock-routes.test.ts
--no-file-parallelism --maxWorkers=1`
- First run: 3 files passed, 98 tests passed;
`issue-stale-execution-lock-routes.test.ts` failed during import because
the isolated worktree initially lacked dev dependency links for
`supertest`.
- `CI=true NODE_ENV=development pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
--ignore-scripts`
- Recreated worktree dev dependency links; emitted unrelated plugin SDK
bin warnings because plugin SDK dist files were not built under
`--ignore-scripts`.
- `./node_modules/.bin/vitest run
server/src/__tests__/issue-stale-execution-lock-routes.test.ts
--no-file-parallelism --maxWorkers=1`
- Passed: 1 file, 7 tests.
- `git diff --check`
- Passed.
## Risks
Low to medium risk. The production code change is intentionally small
and only suppresses duplicate threshold activity logging for
already-open budget incidents, but it affects budget release-gate
observability. The new tests use embedded Postgres and should catch
regressions in budget hard stops, timer wake gating, stale queue
invalidation, and checkout conflict preservation.
> For core feature work, check [`ROADMAP.md`](ROADMAP.md) first and
discuss it in `#dev` before opening the PR. Feature PRs that overlap
with planned core work may need to be redirected — check the roadmap
first. See `CONTRIBUTING.md`.
## Model Used
OpenAI Codex, GPT-5 coding agent, tool-use enabled.
## Checklist
- [x] I have included a thinking path that traces from project context
to this change
- [x] I have specified the model used (with version and capability
details)
- [x] I have checked ROADMAP.md and confirmed this PR does not duplicate
planned core work
- [x] I have searched GitHub for duplicate or related PRs and linked
them above
- [x] I have either (a) linked existing issues with `Fixes: #` / `Closes
#` / `Refs #` OR (b) described the issue in-PR following the relevant
issue template
- [x] I have not referenced internal/instance-local Paperclip issues or
links (only public GitHub `#NNN` / `github.com/paperclipai/paperclip`
URLs)
- [x] My branch name describes the change (e.g. `docs/...`, `fix/...`)
and contains no internal Paperclip ticket id or instance-derived details
- [x] I have run tests locally and they pass
- [x] I have added or updated tests where applicable
- [x] I have updated relevant documentation to reflect my changes
- [x] I have considered and documented any risks above
- [x] All Paperclip CI gates are green
- [x] Greptile is 5/5 with no open P2s, recommendations, or follow-ups
- [x] I will address all Greptile and reviewer comments before
requesting merge
---------
Co-authored-by: Paperclip <noreply@paperclip.ing>
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