[witbrock]

Merge decision: ready — the inbox preserves useful replies when it rejects an inconsistent action, and authorised new coding requests can obtain one correctly scoped native assignment. Worker activation and live model replay remain a separate operator handoff; they are not claimed by this merge.

User outcome

A hardware question with conditional coding/deployment instructions previously lost its completed answer to A reply cannot deploy and asked Michael to create another task. The reply prompt now permits relevant read-only inspection, distinguishes a future deployment request from a reply effect, and can request a new canonical assignment when the current authorised work actually requires coding.

Material changes

• Preserve usable output with an honest rejection warning, retain process/schema/effect diagnostics, and retry missing output once from the durable original request. Failed canonical effects retain their intent for reconciliation without requiring a resend.
• Create/reuse a native assignment using the existing source-message fingerprint mechanism, configured actor/organisation/delegator boundaries, exact original request, and canonical read-back. Recheck source content and participant authority before effects. Reply-only results never deploy; unrelated completed tasks stay completed.
• Select the newest scoped history before limiting to 30, then present it chronologically with freshness/omission metadata. Existing UI pagination remains unchanged.
• Supply canonical task notes, checkpoints, evidence, priority, links, project/collection provenance, attachment metadata and execution/tool limitations. Preserve prior results/follow-ups and distinguish configured execution settings from provider-observed identity. Account for the worker's own reporting fields without swallowing concurrent user instructions.

Tracking: JVNAUTOSCI-2748. Jira remains project authority; the assigned native task is the execution carrier.

Evidence

127 targeted tests passed through PDM: inbox, canonical inbox replay, worker, message service, release installer and deployment regression suites. git diff --check passed.

Coverage includes the exact captured hardware request/result, ordinary replies/status, more than 30 messages with cross-organisation/future exclusions, task-context coverage including the operator activation note, failed process/receipt recovery, source/membership denial, forbidden model/schema selections, creation followed by a crash, and duplicate delivery reconciliation. The actual worker adapter and canonical task/message services also pass an isolated in-memory replay for a useful hardware reply and a new assignment. That replay uses a scripted model response and does not claim live model interpretation or delivery to Michael.

Fresh read-only host observations: 20 ARM cores (10 Cortex-X925 and 10 Cortex-A725), 121 GiB usable RAM/about 99 GiB available, and a 3.7 TiB NVMe drive/about 1.5 TiB free. NVIDIA GPU PCI device 10de:2e12 is visible; nvidia-smi cannot communicate with the driver in this sandbox, and its read-only driver record reports model Unknown. No introspection subsystem or public deployment was needed to obtain the available facts.

Ship boundary

• Minimum merge evidence: preserved answer/denied effects, scoped recent context, single canonical assignment and reply with read-back after a retry, and no regression on the affected worker paths.
• Stop shipment for unintended deployment, wrong-task reactivation, duplicate effects or cross-actor leakage. No such failure appears in the bounded evidence.
• Activation remains outstanding: use the coherent versioned worker/backend release installer under the existing shared lock at a safe controller boundary. Preserve the previous release receipt for rollback, verify the next scheduled adapter's module paths/revision and Astra/xhigh task preferences, and perform a bounded live inbox replay with canonical read-back. Do not overwrite a running controller. No public web restart is required by this fix.
• This coding run cannot access operator configuration, activate the installation, mutate live Von state, or start another coding agent. The controller/operator must complete that handoff and update Jira; the overall task must not yet be marked completed.
• Non-goals: scheduler redesign, UI assignment work, GPU driver/device changes, new infrastructure, migrations, full conversation budgeting or attachment-byte transfer. Other authors' comments remain explicitly omitted. Historical replies already marked delivered are not automatically resent.