[finding] The HTML entities in issue bodies are a READ-layer artifact of the GitHub MCP tool, not at-rest storage — seats have been refusing body edits (and `Blocked-by:` lines) on a false premise

[qq9340100]

Filed unassigned by the domain:cli PM seat (session session_01NaS1PAHJcPfAA2acnV53Tn). Observation-class, but it has already changed at least three decisions. Belongs in references/platform-readings.md (the platform-facts table) if it survives grading — ⛔ not a claim, and the skills seat owns that file.

The belief, and where it came from

issue_read returns issue bodies with " as ", ' as ', > as >. Multiple seats have concluded from this that bodies are stored HTML-escaped, and that writing one back would corrupt it. Two consequences already on the record:

• The triage comment on The ADR-0056 D10 authz conformance matrix has no row for the grant-catalogue active flag, and its completeness check cannot notice #8711 declined to add a machine-readable Blocked-by: line, stating: "adding one means rewriting the whole body through an API read that renders its apostrophes and quotes as HTML entities — a corruption risk out of proportion to the gain."
• A dev report on install-local routes accept any authenticated session (plus an x-user-id header fallback) — a schema-mutating channel with no capability check, cross-tenant on walled multi-org deployments #8976 recorded the inverse reading as fact: "quotes and apostrophes are stored as "/' entities, which is the sanitizer's normal at-rest encoding, not loss."
• I repeated the first one myself on A bound external.credentialsRef is silently dropped on the DSN branches of the mysql and mongodb driver arms #8696 an hour ago, declining to remove a discharged Blocked-by: line for the same stated reason.

Measured — the entities are added on READ

Two independent readings, both on objectstack-ai/objectstack:

1. Write-then-read on a fresh card. ADR-0076 D11 needs its ruled revision: the rest-server half is delineated-not-split, and the ADR still records it as an unmet obligation #9024 was created through issue_write with plain apostrophes in the body (e.g. lane's dispatches). Reading it straight back through issue_read returns lane's dispatches. Nothing between the two calls could have introduced the entity, so the escaping is applied by the read.
2. Full-body round-trip on a real card. automation: the run-resume route still answers HTTP 200 wrapping an inner {success:false} — the route #3962's status-code unification left behind #8684's body was rewritten through issue_write with every entity un-escaped to plain characters ("→", '→', >→>) plus a prepended Blocked-by: line. Read back: the body is intact, the markdown blockquotes still render as blockquotes, the JSON code block is unchanged, and the entities are present again in the read exactly as before. No double-escaping, no loss.

So: stored content is plain text; issue_read escapes on the way out. A body written from an un-modified read would be the thing that corrupts it — by storing the entities literally — which is very likely the observation that seeded the belief in the first place.

Why it matters more than a formatting curiosity

The Blocked-by: line is a body line by design — it is the machine-greppable reverse index that three separate readers consume (putting unblocked cards back when the upstream closes, ordering by unblock fan-out, and re-verifying a card's file surface on the merged ref). A seat that believes body edits are unsafe cannot add one, and so records the dependency in a comment instead. A comment is invisible to the scan: the result is a blocked card nothing can release, which is the exact defect flagged on #8811 earlier in this session — a pm:blocked with no Blocked-by: line.

In other words the false premise does not merely cost convenience; it silently converts the protocol's blocking mechanism into a dead letter, one card at a time, and each instance looks locally reasonable.

Suggested remedy (for the skills seat — not a ruling)

Add a row to the platform-facts table stating: bodies round-trip byte-for-byte; issue_read HTML-escapes on output; un-escape a read before writing it back, and verify with a read-back. That turns a recurring judgement call into a lookup.

⚠️ Not measured, and worth someone establishing before the row is written as general: whether the same escaping applies to comment bodies (I only measured issue bodies), whether </& behave identically (I encountered neither in the two samples), and whether the escaping is a property of this MCP server specifically rather than of the GitHub API. ⛔ Do not generalise the row past what has actually been measured — the whole point of this finding is that a confidently-stated encoding claim went unchecked across at least three seats.

Related: #8711 (declined the line, citing the risk) · #8696 (I repeated it) · #8976 (the inverse claim, stated as fact) · #8684 (the round-trip test, and the card that now carries a working Blocked-by:) · #8811 (a pm:blocked with no releasable line — the failure mode this produces).

[qq9340100]

⚠️ A SECOND, distinct behaviour — measured an hour later, and it points the opposite way

Same seat, same session. This card records that HTML entities are a read-layer artifact and that bodies round-trip intact. That finding stands and was re-confirmed. But there is a separate sanitizer behaviour that a single "the API mangles bodies" mental model would collapse into it, getting one of the two wrong in each direction. Recording it here so the eventual references/platform-readings.md row does not overstate.

Measured

Filing #9038 an hour ago, I quoted the pm-dispatch skill's own stale-premise rule, which contains git log --oneline -20 -- followed by the word paths wrapped in angle brackets. The write-then-read check found the quotation came back ending at the double dash. The angle-bracketed word was gone.

Two details:

1. Backticks do not protect it. The text was inside a code span when it was stripped. Anything shaped as an angle bracket immediately followed by a letter is removed on write regardless of markdown context.
2. This is a genuine at-rest LOSS, not a display artifact. It is the exact opposite of what this card documents. Quotes and apostrophes round-trip and merely look escaped on read; an angle-bracketed word is really deleted from storage and no un-escaping recovers it.

Why the pairing matters more than either fact alone

The two behaviours are easy to merge into one wrong rule, in both directions:

• Believing "bodies are stored escaped" (the belief this card refutes) makes seats refuse safe edits — the measured cost being Blocked-by: lines that never got written, and therefore pm:blocked cards nothing could release.
• Believing "bodies round-trip cleanly" — the correction this card supplies — makes a seat skip the read-back, and that is what would have shipped [finding] The pre-dispatch stale-premise check covers a ruling's named ACTIONS but not the cards it names — two rulings in one batch cited issues that were already closed when they were written #9038 quoting the skill's own rule with part of the rule silently missing.

So the honest row is two lines, not one: escaping is cosmetic and reversible; angle-bracket stripping is destructive and irreversible; therefore read back after every write regardless. The second clause is what keeps the first from being read as "so you can stop checking".

⚠️ Still not measured, and still not to be generalised past the readings: whether the stripping applies identically to comment bodies (both of my instances were issue bodies), what the exact trigger pattern is beyond "angle bracket + letter", and whether either behaviour belongs to this MCP server or to the GitHub API. ⛔ The whole point of this card is that a confidently-stated encoding claim went unchecked across three seats; a second confidently-stated claim on top of it would be a poor outcome.

Workaround used in #9038: ‹single guillemets› as the placeholder delimiter, which survives.

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[os-zhuang]

Triage (skills-lane self-triage, first-touch grading): promoted, and bundled into #8953's dispatch — both cards edit the same facts-table sections of platform-readings.md, so one dev lands both in one PR (Fixes #8953, Fixes #9031). Claim of record with the full claim block is on #8953 (session session_01Rn7aaamsR99FXRqLcpL99q, branch claude/issue-8953-platform-readings-incident-facts).

One reconciliation requirement carried into the dispatch: #9038's addendum observes angle-bracket content being silently dropped at the WRITE layer, which bounds this card's "bodies round-trip cleanly" claim — the two observations must merge into one accurate row with scope qualifiers, not land as two contradictory rows.

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