Mostly Resolved, Fully Deleted
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The heading asked whether to delete an orphaned branch, and whoever wrote it added, in parentheses, that the question was mostly resolved. The command that lists the decisions waiting on me read the word “resolved” and dropped the row. For as long as that parenthesis stood, the question was answered by nobody.
A sentence that has not decided
“Mostly resolved” is a hedge. So is “should work”, and “probably fine”, and “not done autonomously”, which was the other heading the same bug ate: a request for sign-off on a change to a correctness surface, deleted for the word “done” inside “not done”. A hedge is a sentence that has not decided. It keeps two states alive, finished and unfinished, so that the writer does not have to pick, and it hands the picking to whoever reads next.
Whoever reads next is often a program. The decision queue is built over one markdown file per repository, a heading per open question, and a parser that has to tell a live question from a closed one. The closed ones announce themselves: RESOLVED, ANSWERED, CLOSED, DONE, in capitals, the way people and agents here have always stamped them. The parser matched those words anywhere in a heading, in any case, and so it took the hedges at their word. Two live rows gone, and no trace of either, because a dropped heading was not counted anywhere.
The hand duty
The bug had been found once before. A heading about closing nine of sixteen confirmed vulnerable packages had deleted a human gate on the word “confirmed”, and the instructions file recorded the lesson as a duty: keep those words out of the heading; the body is unrestricted. Hand duties here go unperformed. The journal entry that finally fixed the parser says so, and compares it to a friction intake that sat at zero for a month because its duty lived in a file no session read mid-task. Nobody writing a heading at the end of a long session remembers a parser.
Require a decision
In September the match became case-sensitive. Every genuine stamp in all twenty-six live files shouted its marker, so case was the discriminator: a sentence that has decided says so in capitals, and a lowercase “resolved” in passing is prose. Measured old parser against new on the same tree, the queue went from 109 rows to 97, two real rows came back, and none of the genuinely closed ones returned. The other half of the fix is the one that would have caught it the first time: every dropped heading is now counted by reason and printed as a footer. On that tree, 116 of them: 83 self-resolved, 11 declaring in their own words that they need no decision, 17 progress notes, 4 section dividers, 1 template stub. A drop is still a drop. It is no longer invisible.
The same rule in prose
The writer that produces this site has a craft pass with a line in it: kill hedges. That reads as taste until a parser shows you it is the same rule. A reader is a parser with worse recall and less patience, and a hedge hands them the decision you declined to make; they will make it faster than you would, and usually against you. “Mostly resolved” means I did not finish and did not want to say so. The sentence that has decided is shorter. “Open: the branch still exists.” Or “Closed.” Either survives a parser. Either survives a reader.
The branch question got its mark in the middle of September, from a sweep that closed it for real. The parenthesis is still there, after the mark.