ADR-132: Fail-closed approval audit and turn binding 

Context 

Two defects sat on the same code path, ResumeCoordinator::approve() .

The decision that authorises a write was not audited. AgentRunPersister::recordApproval() caught every Throwable , logged a warning and returned void . The coordinator called it unchecked and continued into the execution. A destructive tool call could therefore be approved and executed with nothing anywhere recording who approved it. The write step audit has been fail-closed since ADR-111 — AuditPersistenceFailedException fails a run whose WRITING tool executed but whose step could not be stored. The decision that authorised the write was not covered by anything.

The reviewed turn was bound on one surface only. The stale-review digest introduced with ADR-109 lived in AgentRunController::approveAction() . The Tool Playground's awaiting_approval payload returned no digest and its resume endpoint read only runUuid and approve — so the playground could approve a turn it had never displayed. Worse, the module's own check ran before the atomic claim, against the row as it was then.

Decision 

One digest definition. The computation moved out of the inbox view factory into PendingTurnDigest , a small @internal service both the rendering side and the verifying side use. A digest is a comparison; two implementations that drift apart silently compare different things. The hash covers the pending calls only — the transcript and the counters change every round and would make every digest stale.

The digest travels with the decision. ApprovalDecision carries a third property, turnDigest. Both surfaces hand it through; neither compares anything. The comparison happens once, inside the coordinator.

The verified state is the state loaded after the claim. Losing the claim race does not leave the run untouched: the winner runs the turn, the loop continues, and the run can suspend again on a different turn — which is exactly the row the next claim succeeds on. The pre-claim read would be the previous turn, so the digest check, the write classification and the execution all read the freshly claimed row.

The state is nevertheless decoded twice, and the two decodes answer different questions. The pre-claim decode asks "was this row readable when we found it" and refuses without claiming — a row corrupted outside the extension stays WAITING_FOR_APPROVAL with its blob intact, so an operator can inspect and repair it. The post-claim decode asks "is the row we actually won readable" and must settle the run on a no, because the claim is already held and an unreadable state cannot be written back. Both are needed. Dropping the pre-claim one would make the ordinary corrupt-row case terminal on the first Approve click, and the guarded terminal settle clears suspended_state — destroying the evidence along with the run, the outcome AgentRunExecutor already names as the one to avoid. Dropping the post-claim one would let the race resume a turn nobody verified.

Two gates between the claim and the execution.

1. The decision must name the turn it was made on. A null digest and a mismatching digest both mean "the reviewed turn is not known", so both are refused; the comparison is hash_equals() .
2. An approval whose APPROVAL event could not be stored may not execute a turn that declares a write. "Declares a write" is ToolEffectResolver::effectFor() (ADR-111), which already resolves an unknown name to NON_IDEMPOTENT_WRITE; a pending entry too corrupt to yield a call at all counts as a write too.

A refused decision releases the run. Both gates suspend the run back to WAITING_FOR_APPROVAL — the existing RUNNING → WAITING transition, which clears the claim and the lease and writes the state back. Nothing executed and nothing settled, so the operator re-reviews the current turn and decides again. A release that itself fails settles the run instead, because a run left RUNNING with no worker is invisible to the inbox and to the reaper alike.

What this deliberately is not 

• Not fail-closed for read-only turns. A read-only turn whose decision could not be stored continues, with the failure logged. The audit gap is real, but nothing changes state, and refusing would strand a harmless run behind an unavailable audit store.
• Not fail-closed for a denial. A denial passes gate 1 — deciding on a turn nobody reviewed is as wrong when the answer is "no" — but not gate 2. Gate 2 exists to stop an unaudited write from executing, and a denial executes nothing. Refusing it would leave the write-declaring turn pending and approvable while the operator who wanted it gone is turned away. "Who denied" is still lost, which is why the failure is logged rather than silent.
• Not a new repository method. The release reuses AgentRunPersister::suspend() . The transition it needs already exists.
• Not a per-call verdict. One decision still covers the whole pending turn; the digest binds the turn, not individual calls.

Consequences 

• AgentRunPersister::recordApproval() returns bool , the same shape as recordStep() . The class is no longer uniformly "fail-soft": it never throws, but two methods hand the caller the evidence to fail closed.
• Two new request-validation exceptions, StaleApprovalTurnException and ApprovalNotAuditableException , join the AgentRuntimeException family. Both surfaces map them: the module to the existing runs.error.staleReview and a new runs.error.notAuditable flash, the playground to a 409 and a 503 that both re-signal awaiting_approval.
• ApprovalDecision 's constructor gained a third argument. It is optional in the signature for source compatibility only — a null is refused at runtime — so a third party constructing the decision itself must supply the digest of the turn it displayed.
• The playground carries turnDigest in both its batch pause payload and its streamed awaiting_approval event. It ships no approval UI of its own today, so no client code consumes it yet; the value is there for the first one that does.
• The controller-side stale check in AgentRunController is gone. One definition of the invariant, in the one place that holds the claim. Its unreadable-state pre-filter is gone with it, but the operator sees the same runs.unreadable flash: the coordinator's pre-claim decode throws CorruptSuspendedStateException , which that action already maps. The Tool Playground, which never had such a pre-filter, gains the guard for the first time.