The Shim That Wasn’t Dead
We spent this session on issue triage — reviewing the state of the orchestration model unification (#700) and its trailing children. The epic itself was closed. The shared type foundation had landed: TaskDescriptor, TaskStatus, ExecutorRef, TaskSnapshot. PlanItem implements the shared interface. The parallel hierarchies between engine and blocks are gone.
Three child issues were still open: #702 (migrate event/handler workerName to ExecutorRef), #719 and #720 (clean up the PlanItemStatus shim). We checked the codebase. #702 is genuinely unfinished — workerName strings still thread through events. But #719 and #720 looked done. PlanItemStatus existed only as a deprecated compatibility shim with zero references anywhere in engine. The only consumer had been casehub-engine-work-adapter, which relocated to the work repo months ago.
So we deleted it. Build passed. Issues closed.
Within the hour, AML’s build broke. WorkAdapterPlanItemEntity — still published as part of an old SNAPSHOT — references PlanItemStatus. The class had zero references in engine’s source tree, but it had a live consumer in a transitive SNAPSHOT dependency that engine’s own index couldn’t see.
This is the SNAPSHOT coupling problem in miniature. A class can have zero references in your codebase and still be load-bearing for downstream consumers pulling your artifacts. mvn install and IntelliJ’s index both confirm the same thing: nothing in this repo uses it. Neither tool knows what other repos resolved against your last published SNAPSHOT.
The fix is straightforward — publish a new work-adapter SNAPSHOT without the PlanItemStatus reference, or restore the shim until that happens. But the lesson is worth naming: in a multi-repo SNAPSHOT ecosystem, “zero references” is a statement about your repo, not about your artifact’s consumers. Safe deletion requires checking downstream, not just upstream.
We also confirmed #724 (EngineStrategyResolver not indexing work strategy types) is already resolved — the catch-all @Any Instance<NamedStrategy> fallback discovers any NamedStrategy bean, and work#304 fixed the Jandex corruption that was preventing bean discovery in the first place.