repo-sweep next: no-findings tick conflates nothing fixed with nothing found

[kyle-sexton]

Problem

skills/repo-sweep/reference/next.md section 4.3 ticks no findings whenever git status --porcelain -- . ':!.work' is empty. That treats "nothing was fixed" as "nothing was found". Skills with report-only tiers, such as provenance's source-fetched-similar, llm-suspected and not-found, never produce an edit by design, so their findings vanish from the sweep record. Nothing in the flow forces the step 3.3 user review ("The user reviews them for accuracy before anything is fixed") to happen before the tick.

Evidence

melodic-software/.github#153, provenance step: ticked [x] provenance: provenance:audit@0.5.15, no findings with report-only candidates never adjudicated and no user review of the findings.

Fix

• Require step 3.3 (the user reviews the findings) before any tick, including no-findings.
• Distinguish the outcomes on the checklist line: for example no findings versus no fix-eligible findings (N report-only), with tick.sh accepting the count.

[kyle-sexton]

Another case of the same conflation, from melodic-software/.github#153: when a skill reports findings and the user declines every one of them in the step 3.4 scope questions, the tree stays clean and step 4.3 ticks no findings, which is false. The scope decisions that step 3.4 records "for the commit" are also lost, because no commit is made.

Additions to the fix:

• Give the declined case its own outcome, for example findings declined (N), and keep the scope decisions somewhere durable when there is no commit (the checklist line or a PR comment).
• A new tick label means updating the done-line pattern in tick.sh line 58 ((, committed [0-9a-f]+|, no findings)$) and any state.sh done detection that uses the same pattern.

[kyle-sexton]

Reopened. The 2026-09-27 maintainer comment asked for a declined outcome and a durable place for scope decisions when no commit is made. That was not delivered before closing. This comes from the 2026-09-29 audit of the unattended Cursor run.

Fixed in #5295 (T3), which uses Closes #4575:

• tick.sh <id> declined <n> records the outcome; the done line gains , findings declined (N).
• The done-line pattern is extended in tick.sh and state.sh.
• next.md step 4.3 posts the scope decisions as a sweep-PR comment when there is no commit.

Accepted limitation: the review-before-tick gate stays prose. Revisit if the melodic-software/.github#153 failure recurs.

Duplicate search (open and closed): only open #5167 (the instruction-placement entry cannot persist declines) matched. It is a different issue that can use the new outcome; #5295 does not close it, and no follow-up is filed.