fix(core): watch the channel path Slack replies actually arrive in

[khaliqgant]

Stacked on #33 → #32 → #31. Review in that order; this PR's diff is the last commit only.

Summary

A Slack human-assistance gate could post its question and then never see a correctly threaded human answer, timing out after up to 24h with no indication why.

Relayfile materializes a channel under BOTH /slack/channels/<id> and /slack/channels/<id>__<name>, and delivers inbound messages and thread replies to the suffixed one. slackHumanAnswerSubscriptionPaths derived that suffix by slugifying whatever identifier the caller passed:

passed  : C0B9Z4CLG1J        (a channel ID — the documented alternative to a name)
guessed : /slack/channels/C0B9Z4CLG1J__c0b9z4clg1j/**     ← does not exist
actual  : /slack/channels/C0B9Z4CLG1J__watchdog-test/**   ← replies land here

Given a channel name it reconstructs the real directory. Given an ID there is no way to derive <name>, so the run watched only the bare-id path.

Observed failure

A gate asked in C0B9Z4CLG1J; a human replied in-thread 71 seconds later; the answer was never observed.

path	entries	newest
C0B9Z4CLG1J	30	2026-07-10
C0B9Z4CLG1J__watchdog-test	281	current

The reply was in …__watchdog-test/threads/1786974952_659989/replies/1786975023_841419 with thread_ts matching the question exactly.

Two earlier diagnoses were wrong and are worth recording so nobody repeats them: a missing /slack credential grant (it is mintable on demand via the cloud join route), and stale inbound sync (sync was healthy — the bare-id path was simply the wrong place to look). The subscription path was the entire problem.

Fix

The channel index already maps id -> title, and the runner already reads it to resolve a name to an id. This reads it the other way to recover the title, so the suffix is derived from data rather than from a guess about the caller's input. One file read, no pagination, no new API surface.

A missing or unreadable index is non-fatal: it logs that replies delivered to an <id>__<name> directory may be missed, rather than failing the run.

Rejected first attempt, for the record

Listing /slack/channels and matching directory names. That listing is paginated — 22 entries plus a cursor, alphabetically from C0AC… — so the target channel sat on a later page and the match silently returned nothing. It would have looked like a fix while doing nothing.

Verification

Live, end to end:

watching "/slack/channels/C0B9Z4CLG1J__watchdog-test/**" (resolved from the Slack channel index)
Received Slack human answer; injecting into ask-human-and-use-answer-38a3c2ef

Plus 10 new unit tests, including a regression guard that the id-slugified path is never produced. Suite 873 passed with the one pre-existing workflow-runner persona-runtime failure unchanged; no new typecheck errors.

⚠️ This required building packages/core by hand. npm run build --workspace=packages/core is red on main (7 pre-existing typecheck errors in builder.ts, persona-runtime.ts, runner.ts) and @relayflows/core resolves through dist/, so local runs in this repo silently execute the last successful build. Worth fixing separately — it makes local verification of any packages/core change misleading by default.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Summary by cubic

Ensure Slack human-assistance gates observe threaded replies when the caller provides a channel ID. Previously we subscribed to the bare <id> path and guessed the <id>__<slug> path from the input; now we resolve and subscribe to the real <id>__<name> path using the Slack channel index.

• Read the synced Slack channel index to map id -> title and build the suffixed glob via new slackChannelTitleSlug and slackSuffixedChannelPath helpers; keep watching the bare-id and name-slug paths as fallbacks.
• Treat a missing or unreadable index as non-fatal and log that replies in an <id>__<name> directory may be missed; do not fabricate the old id__id-slug path.
• Resolve the index from /slack/channels/_index.json or /discovery/slack/channels/_index.json; this adds one read and no pagination.
• Add tests for slugging, path construction, and a regression guard against the id__id-slug path; no API changes.

^{Written for commit 3b48816. Summary will update on new commits.}

[coderabbitai]

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