distill: Backlog Stubs Become GitHub Issues (#185)

[sameera]

Distillation: Backlog Stubs Become GitHub Issues

Drained queue entries: .nexus/tmp/epic-185/ (ephemeral, same-sitting close) — provenance: #185

The why came from decision record #192, fetched and hash-verified against the digest stamped at close (55493c77…). The what came from the recorded range 3735d95…9d42385, resolved through merged PR #217.

backlog-stub — create

• What changed: New page. A backlog stub is an epic identified but not yet planned — an epic issue carrying the declared epic classification plus exactly one label denoting that unplanned state. Covers both writers (the epic stage's oversized path, the close stage's deferred scope) filing through the one batch path with caller-supplied classification and a fail-closed label preflight; the never-a-sub-issue rule and the close-gate deadlock it prevents; promotion populating the same issue in place; the not-planned close for a stub too large for one epic; and the backlog collapsing to one query with one negated filter.
• Why (Decision Log entry): "A stub is an epic born unplanned, and its number survives promotion" — a stub already is an epic, so modelling it as a third species would force every consumer to learn one and would answer the classification question twice, once per mode, where no suitable issue type exists.
• Provenance: #185 (Backlog Stubs Become GitHub Issues #185)
• Reciprocal edits: epic-approval-gate

epic-approval-gate — update

• What changed: Sheds the stub detail it no longer owns (the slug, the per-feature file, promotion "on demand") to the new page, and states the current shape: oversized scope files stub issues, and the gate's consent covers an irreversible platform write rather than a local append. Invariant 4 rewritten accordingly. The alias stub decomposition moved to backlog-stub, where it now resolves.
• Why (Decision Log entry): "Oversized scope files stub issues, and a promotion re-enters by issue number" — retiring the file retires the slug those blocks were addressed by, which is what forces the operation to be stated rather than inferred.
• Provenance: #185 (Backlog Stubs Become GitHub Issues #185)
• Reciprocal edits: backlog-stub

Reviewer notes

1. backlog-stub declares only one touches link, and that is a cap artefact rather than a judgement about the concept. Its real neighbours are publishing-config-resolution (the unplanned label is one more resolved key; the batch path's classification now comes from the caller), issue-sourced-planning (the resolver refuses an unplanned epic by name), and durable-close-record (deferred scope is filed post-checkpoint, before the record naming those numbers is committed). All three sit at 398–400 body words with 7/7 invariants. A reciprocal Integration Points bullet costs ~15 words, so declaring any of those touches would push the target over the 400-word cap, and an update may not compress still-true content to make room. epic-approval-gate was linkable only because this epic genuinely superseded its stub prose. Those relationships are carried in backlog-stub's own prose instead.

2. The store is saturated against the cap store-wide. Nine pages sit at exactly 400 words, twenty more at 394–399. New concepts can no longer link into the existing graph without a split somewhere, which degrades the touches-as-neighbour-list retrieval the store depends on. Flagging as an operational finding; no page was split in this drain, since none of the saturated pages is broad because of this epic.

3. One anchor outside the touched set was refreshed. .nexus/anchors/workspace-resolution.md carried two lines this epic falsified — the stub-promotion glob across backlogs, and close writing deferred scope under the feature path. The close record explicitly deferred that repoint to the drain rather than hand-editing a derived file on the feature branch (record #192 invariant 17, narrowed with rationale). Anchors are derived state that stale-rebuilds by design, so it is regenerated here.

4. One extra commit rides this branch. 9278722 adds docs/delivery/lessons/2026-08-02-backlog-stubs-as-issues.md — epic #185's process lesson. The close wrote it, PR #217 merged without it, and the close record points at that exact path, so the trunk carried a dangling reference. Committed with the lead's explicit consent at the preflight gate.

Anchors refreshed (derived, never hand-edited)

• .nexus/anchors/backlog-stub.md @ 9d42385a3585858bf599987598a214d4daa37968
• .nexus/anchors/epic-approval-gate.md @ 9d42385a3585858bf599987598a214d4daa37968
• .nexus/anchors/workspace-resolution.md @ 9d42385a3585858bf599987598a214d4daa37968

Atlas regenerated (derived)

• docs/concepts.md (48 concepts)

Consumed queue entries (removed by this PR)

This PR already removes the drained entry's committed home on the branch, so the merge deletes it from main atomically with the page writes — no manual post-merge step:

• .nexus/queue/epic-185/ — the epic's per-user scratch dir (recoverable via git history). The drained entry itself was ephemeral, so this is what the committed removal targets.
• The .nexus/tmp/epic-185/ copy is machine-local and is cleaned, uncommitted, by the next /nxs.distill run once this PR's provenance is on the trunk.