PR #1313 — GOVERNS Backlog Automation: Auto-Associate Discovered and Planned Work

The Broader Goal

In autonomous multi-agent development fleets, tasks and technical debt are discovered dynamically during interactive sessions, autonomous dispatch jobs, and health diagnostics (synlynk doctor).

Part of the Autonomous Operations Activation roadmap (#1198), Issue #1203 implements GOVERNS Backlog Automation: a deterministic, deduplicated, lifecycle-aware subsystem that captures discovered work, maps it to the 7-stage GOVERNS taxonomy (goal, open, visualize, execute, release, notify, sustain), and safely synchronizes it with GitHub Issues without spam or duplication.

What Was Missing & Root Cause

Previously:

• No automated subsystem existed to capture and structure discovered work across devlogs, job outputs, or doctor failures.
• Unstructured auto-filing risked duplicate-issue spam on GitHub.
• Discovered work was not tied to the 7-stage GOVERNS lifecycle model or tracked in state.db.

What Shipped

1. Deterministic Fingerprinting & 4-Layer Anti-Spam Deduplication (synlynk/backlog.py):

   • Implemented compute_fingerprint(title, source_ref) using SHA-256 over normalized title and source references.
   • Enforced deduplication across state.db:stories unique fingerprint index, existing titles, and open GitHub issues.

2. Signal Extraction Heuristics (synlynk/backlog_extractor.py):

   • Added extractors for devlog follow-up sections and <!-- discover: ... --> markers.
   • Added parsers for out-of-scope FOLLOWUP: / TECH-DEBT: items in autonomous job outputs.
   • Added doctor failure conversion into governs:sustain maintenance tasks.

3. Data Model & Schema Migration (synlynk/db.py, synlynk/__init__.py):

   • Bumped _DB_MIGRATION_VERSION to 5.
   • Added fingerprint, source_type, source_ref, and governs_stage columns with unique index on stories.

4. CLI Subcommand Surface (synlynk/cli.py):

   • Added synlynk backlog capture for staging discovered work.
   • Added synlynk backlog list for inspecting staged backlog items.
   • Added synlynk backlog sync for dry-run and upstream GitHub issue creation.

5. Session Checkpoint Integration (synlynk/__init__.py:checkpoint):

   • Automatically scans session devlogs during checkpoint/session boundary and stages new action items into the backlog.

6. Comprehensive Unit & Integration Test Suite (tests/test_backlog_automation.py):

   • Added 8 test cases covering fingerprint normalization, deduplication, signal extraction, staging, GitHub syncing, and CLI commands.