[reason-machines]

Summary

• Add parallel competition orchestration: distinct provider candidates run in isolated worktrees; the read-only judge returns a structured winner, summary, and rationale while preserving usable partial results.
• Persist competition runs and candidate attempts/results; only candidates from the latest run can be selected. Judge failures remain visible while successful candidates stay reviewable.
• Implement automatic strengths synthesis as a separate candidate in a fresh isolated worktree, using the configured judge model. The synthesizer receives candidate diffs as untrusted data; source candidates remain unchanged.
• Synthesis is available only when the latest run has at least two successful candidates; a successful synthesis is one-time per run. Failed/empty synthesis is recorded without an empty diff and can be retried.
• Persist synthesis events and attempt data; show the synthesized candidate first with its diff and normal explicit winner selection.
• Recover interrupted synthesis on server restart, mark orphaned attempts failed, and emit a terminal error so the UI does not remain stuck.
• Recheck task status and operation reservations after async request-body/config reads to prevent overlapping synthesis/selection requests.
• Bound total provider prompts to 24,000 UTF-8 bytes and reject synthesis when the configured judge provider cannot edit code.
• Ensure provider, publish, and database exceptions mark attempts terminal where possible and release the operation lock.
• Record the owner’s choice of automatic synthesis in the plan/status docs.

Checks

• env -u GIT_AUTHOR_NAME -u GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL -u GIT_COMMITTER_NAME -u GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL pnpm check — passed: Prettier, ESLint, workspace typecheck; 181 tests passed, 2 skipped.
• pnpm exec vitest run --project orchestrator --project server — passed: 44 tests.
• pnpm --filter @joy/web exec playwright test e2e/t2.1.spec.ts — passed: 3 E2E specs.
• git diff --check — passed.
• All tests use fake providers; no real model was called.
• GitHub Actions for head 65a026c569e4c543f9da8d33efdac18b4e616036 — passed on Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows.

UI evidence

Review

The independent review's prior findings have been addressed and re-reviewed with no remaining findings. No GitHub review has been submitted.

The owner selected automatic strengths synthesis; the previously pending design decision is resolved. This change is ready for review and merge.

Contributors

• Co-authored-by: jimmynycuee <170504951+jimmynycuee@users.noreply.github.com>