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98. Evaluate harnesses against entities with optional event context ​

Date: 2026-09-03

Status ​

Accepted

Partially supersedes ADR 0061: a NormalizedEvent is no longer the sole CEL input to a harness trigger. ADR 0061's remaining dispatch decisions remain current.

Partially supersedes ADR 0063: polling no longer has to reconstruct changes as NormalizedEvent values. ADR 0063's poll command, driver architecture, per-repo scope, and coordination decisions remain current.

Extends ADR 0054 with a scoped authorization path for Fullsend-originated entity discovery that has no prompting event actor; event-backed dispatch authorization is unchanged.

Context ​

ADR 0061 made a NormalizedEvent the sole CEL input to a harness trigger, and ADR 0063 extended that model to polling by reconstructing entity changes as events. That fits transition-oriented rules, but state-oriented agents must recover complete event history to answer durable questions such as whether an authorized /fs-fix comment remains unhandled or an issue needs periodic reconsideration (#313, agents#1137).

Event reconstruction loses source-specific fidelity, consumes API capacity, and can permanently miss work across checkpoint gaps. Conversely, replacing events would discard useful transition and actor context. Harness authors need one rule that works when either a live event or scheduled discovery prompts evaluation.

Options ​

Continue reconstructing events for polling ​

One trigger shape remains simple, but poll drivers must recover ordered history and a missed transition may never be reconsidered.

Add separate event and entity predicates ​

Each path is explicit, but authors must keep two routing rules consistent and the two rules may disagree about the same entity.

Use one predicate over an entity and optional event ​

Both paths share one decision rule; entity resolution and durable processing state become platform responsibilities.

Decision ​

  • Predicate context: Adopt one harness CEL predicate evaluated with a required forge-neutral entity and a nullable event. The predicate may inspect either or both. Harnesses that declare entity sources and can therefore be evaluated without a prompting event MUST test event != null before accessing event fields. This test provides crash safety only; a harness intended to match during scheduled discovery MUST also express an entity-state condition that can succeed when event is null. Harnesses without entity sources remain event-triggered only, always receive an event, and need no compatibility change to existing event-based predicates. Trigger CEL represents a missing event as CEL null. Overlay when expressions also receive the required entity and nullable event. The normalized entity MUST expose its source system as entity.source.system; overlays used for entity discovery select source-specific configuration from that field rather than event.source.system.
  • Candidate sources: Event-driven dispatch resolves the event's entity and supplies both values; scheduled discovery supplies the entity with event set to null. Events are a low-latency source of candidates, not the authoritative representation of whether an entity still needs work.
  • Entity resolution: Harnesses declare entity sources that enumerate candidate identities and resolve an identity to its current normalized representation. Fullsend MAY combine compatible sources into shared provider queries, but each harness defines its own predicate and handled-state test. fullsend poll and its pluggable drivers remain valid mechanisms for scheduled enumeration and resolution.
  • Handled-state evidence: The normalized entity contract MUST provide stable cross-system identity, current state, the bounded or queryable activity required by the harness, and actor context. An action-indicating element is actor-originated entity history whose content or state is treated as a request for a stage to run, including issue or change-proposal bodies, comments, reviews, and label applications when used for that purpose. Every such element MUST expose actor provenance and the actor's current forge permission level resolved at entity evaluation time. A harness MAY infer that qualifying activity has already been handled from entity state, such as an existing triage comment, or use an explicit per-harness receipt or poll checkpoint. The field-level contract and query-planning protocol belong in a versioned normative specification and MUST exist before entity-first execution is enabled.
  • Scheduling: Recurring evaluation MAY be initiated by a platform/default clock or constrained by scheduling metadata in the harness. The clock is scheduling machinery, not an authorization principal. Scheduled entity discovery is denied unless the harness opts in through valid entity sources and effective platform policy permits it. Missing or malformed entity sources deny scheduled evaluation for that harness; missing, malformed, or unverifiable platform eligibility policy denies every scheduled evaluation governed by that policy. The effective schedule may still come from platform defaults or harness metadata. Every resulting run uses the harness's configured agent identity and permissions.
  • Authorization: ADR 0054 continues to authorize event-backed dispatch from its event actor. A fullsend poll entity-discovery run is instead authorized by its trusted Fullsend-controlled origin; callers that cannot establish that provenance are denied. Entity history remains untrusted input. For each candidate harness, before evaluating its CEL predicate, the platform MUST enumerate a platform-defined closed superset of action-indicating elements for the entity kind and remove those whose actor's current permission does not meet that harness's observation or mutation threshold. Failed, unavailable, or incomplete enumeration denies evaluation of that entity; only successful enumeration may produce an empty set for state-only predicates. CEL can additionally restrict action using the retained elements and their current actor permissions, but does not select an element for a later authorization gate. Further trust and injection filtering MAY run after CEL routing and before the harness pre-script. Neither entity content nor a historical actor can alter the run's configured identity or permissions.
  • Attribution: A scheduled run without a prompting human is attributable to the verified Fullsend invocation identity, target repository, effective platform policy, harness revision, and resolved entity. The audit record also identifies every retained action-indicating element and its actor. For state-only predicates such as staleness, the configured service identity and versioned policy/harness configuration are the initiating authority.

Consequences ​

  • Harness authors maintain one predicate across event and polling contexts. Harnesses opting into entity sources must guard event access with event != null, and those intended to match during scheduled discovery must include an entity-state condition that can succeed when event is null.
  • Poll drivers can discover current actionable state without reconstructing a complete synthetic event stream.
  • Harnesses may reuse entity state as handled-state evidence instead of writing separate receipts or checkpoints.
  • Efficient cross-entity enumeration may still require provider-specific indexing beyond a forge's native query API; resolution and persistence do not necessarily require new infrastructure.
  • Event actors and historical activity remain usable in CEL without weakening the centralized authorization boundary.
  • Existing source-specific overlay expressions that inspect event.source.system must use entity.source.system for entity-discovery runs.
  • Existing event-only harnesses remain compatible; harnesses opt into nullable event context by declaring entity sources. ADR 0063's event-reconstruction path still requires a migration plan for polling drivers.