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Make a Promote publication happen at most once - #207

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ralyodio merged 5 commits into
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worktree-promote-arch-refresh
Aug 19, 2026
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ralyodio merged 5 commits into
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worktree-promote-arch-refresh

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@ralyodio ralyodio commented Aug 19, 2026 •

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Closes acceptance criteria 10 and 14 in docs/promote-engine-architecture.md.

The bug

The sweep decided and published in one pass, "claiming" a campaign by pushing next_run_at forward. That UPDATE carried no predicate on next_run_at, so it was a read-then-write — two sweeps that both read the row both won it. The worker runs the sweep on a 60s interval and out-of-band whenever someone clicks "Post now" (POST /dashboard/promote/sweep), so overlapping runs are designed in, not rare.

Nothing downstream was idempotent either. A crash after postViaAccount() published but before the promo_post insert left no record it happened, and last_promoted_at is only stamped at the end of the campaign — so the same link was still least-recently-promoted on the next tick and went out again. The user sees a duplicate; the logs show nothing.

The fix

promo_job makes the intended publication the unit of work, written down before anything is sent.

Plan before publishing. Jobs are keyed on sha256(list, link, account, destination, kind, slot), where the slot is the next_run_at value the sweep observed as due. A racing sweep reads the same due row, derives the same keys, loses to the unique index, and gets nothing back — so it publishes nothing. Keying on the wall clock would give each sweep its own key and rebuild the bug.

Claim by compare-and-swap. update ... where id = ? and state = 'queued'. Read and write are one statement, so two workers cannot both observe queued.

The campaign-level claim keeps its place and now carries a predicate too — it re-asserts the same "still due" condition the select used (.lte("next_run_at", dueBy)), so once the winner has pushed the campaign forward the loser matches nothing. It re-asserts the condition rather than matching the exact timestamp read back: a predicate that silently never matched would stop every campaign posting with nothing in the logs. Either way it is an optimization that avoids duplicated work — the guarantee is in the job.

At most once, on purpose

A job still publishing past a 10 minute lease is failed, never retried. No provider we publish through accepts an idempotency key, so an interrupted publish has genuinely unknown outcome — it may be live. Re-running it is the duplicate this exists to prevent. The reaper closes it with the outcome recorded as unknown and leaves it in history for a human. The credit is deliberately not refunded: refunding a post that did land is the other way to be wrong, and support can refund from history.

Retry stays available for failures that provably happened before the publish call — that is what the retrying state and attempt_count are for.

promo_job.user_id references public.profiles(id), matching promo_list — not auth.users, which would let a job outlive the profile row the rest of the feature is keyed to and cascade differently from its own campaign.

Deploy order — migration first

planJobs() logs loudly and publishes nothing if promo_job is missing, rather than failing the select and stopping every campaign in silence the way source_mix did in #204. That is a guard, not the fix: apply supabase/migrations/20260819120000_promote_jobs.sql before this deploys.

Also here

The first commit reconciles the architecture doc with #205 and #206, which both landed under it the same day:

  • §4.1 still described the raw configured mix, not effectiveMix(). Anyone reading it to extend the blend would have rebuilt the bug that mislabelled six production posts as via_fallback.
  • §14 listed "pause after repeated provider rejections" as unbuilt; lib/sp/accountHealth.ts makes it half-built, at the account layer.

Verification

  • npm run typecheck — clean
  • npm test — 1667 passed, 7 skipped (132 files), including 19 new tests in tests/promote/jobs.test.ts covering key stability, the racing-sweep collapse, single-winner claim, and the reaper refusing to requeue or to overwrite a slow worker that finished first
  • next lint is broken at HEAD under Next 16 and is not in CI; not touched here

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

The architecture doc was written in #204 and hasn't moved since, but two PRs
landed under it the same day and both changed things it describes as settled.

#205 added effectiveMix(): the ownership mix is narrowed to the classes a
campaign can actually supply before any deficit is computed. §4.1 still
described the raw configured mix, which is the version that mislabelled six
production posts as via_fallback and was three posts from silencing the
campaign. Someone reading §4 to extend the blend would have rebuilt the bug,
so the rule and the reason it exists are now in the doc rather than only in
the PR that fixed it. §4.2 gets the corresponding scope limit: covering for a
class the campaign never had is not a fallback and is not capped as one.

#206 added lib/sp/accountHealth.ts, which partly satisfies §14's "pause
campaigns after repeated provider rejections" — at the account layer, not the
campaign layer. Noted as half-built, because the Reddit provider will still
need the campaign-level version: a subreddit rejection is a destination fact,
not an account one.

Docs only; no behaviour change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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ThreatCrush Security Scan

35 finding(s)

HIGH/CRITICAL: 3 | MEDIUM: 23 | LOW: 9

Severity Rule Location
HIGH tls-verification-disabled lib/onion.ts:47
HIGH secret-generic-credential lib/sp/platforms/facebook.ts:32
HIGH sh-remote-script-execution prober/deploy/provision.sh:30
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(app)/dashboard/admin/email-broadcast/EmailBroadcastForm.tsx:125
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(app)/dashboard/projects/[id]/autoblog/articles/[articleId]/page.tsx:214
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/blog/[slug]/page.tsx:67
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/blog/[slug]/page.tsx:97
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/blog/[slug]/page.tsx:104
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/blog/[slug]/page.tsx:110
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/recent/page.tsx:186
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/(marketing)/recent/page.tsx:190
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/c/[project]/[slug]/page.tsx:77
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/c/[project]/page.tsx:57
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/careers.js/route.ts:228
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/careers.js/route.ts:285
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/layout.tsx:129
MEDIUM js-open-redirect app/login/form.tsx:39
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink app/r/[token]/page.tsx:176
MEDIUM js-open-redirect app/signup/form.tsx:43
MEDIUM js-open-redirect components/billing/buy-credits-modal.tsx:98
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink components/json-ld.tsx:8
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink components/report/markdown-view.tsx:15
MEDIUM redos-nested-quantifier lib/careers/jobs.ts:139
MEDIUM js-unescaped-html-sink lib/careers/page-templates.ts:198
MEDIUM redos-nested-quantifier lib/emailMarkdown.ts:130
MEDIUM redos-nested-quantifier lib/lx/articleGen.ts:98
LOW secret-generic-credential app/(marketing)/docs/autoblog-webhook/page.tsx:145
LOW secret-generic-credential lib/sp/platforms/linkedin.ts:25
LOW js-dynamic-code-execution tests/careers-page-templates.test.ts:21
LOW js-dynamic-code-execution tests/careers-widget-script.test.ts:19
LOW js-dynamic-code-execution tests/careers-widget-script.test.ts:69
LOW js-dynamic-code-execution tests/contract/ad-visitor-id.test.ts:51
LOW js-dynamic-code-execution tests/contract/ad-visitor-id.test.ts:52
LOW secret-generic-credential tests/contract/posthog-integration.test.ts:13
LOW secret-generic-credential tests/lead-campaign.test.ts:16

Snippets are redacted; ThreatCrush never prints matched credential material.

The sweep decided and published in one pass, "claiming" a campaign by pushing
next_run_at forward. That UPDATE carried no predicate on next_run_at, so it was
a read-then-write: two sweeps that both read the row both won it. And the
worker runs the sweep on a 60s interval *and* out-of-band whenever someone
clicks "Post now", so overlapping runs are designed in, not rare.

Nothing downstream was idempotent either. If the process died after
postViaAccount() published but before the promo_post insert, there was no
record it had happened — and last_promoted_at is only stamped at the end of the
campaign, so the same link was still least-recently-promoted on the next tick
and went out again. The user sees a duplicate; the logs show nothing.

promo_job makes the intended publication the unit of work, written down before
anything is sent. Two mechanisms:

- Plan before publishing. Jobs are keyed on sha256(list, link, account,
  destination, kind, slot), where the slot is the next_run_at value the sweep
  observed as due. A racing sweep reads the same due row, derives the same
  keys, loses to the unique index, and gets nothing back — so it publishes
  nothing. Keying on the wall clock instead would give each sweep its own key
  and rebuild the bug.
- Claim by compare-and-swap: update ... where id = ? and state = 'queued'. Read
  and write are one statement, so two workers cannot both see 'queued'.

The campaign-level claim keeps its place but now carries its predicate. It is
an optimization — it avoids duplicated work. The guarantee is in the job.

AT MOST ONCE, ON PURPOSE. A job still 'publishing' past a 10 minute lease is
failed, never retried. No provider we publish through accepts an idempotency
key, so an interrupted publish has genuinely unknown outcome — it may be live.
Re-running it is the duplicate this exists to prevent. The reaper closes it with
the outcome recorded as unknown and leaves it in history for a human; the credit
is not refunded, because refunding a post that did land is the other way to be
wrong. Retry stays available for failures that provably happened before the
publish call, which is what 'retrying' and attempt_count are for.

Stray jobs are closed rather than left queued: nothing reclaims a queued job, so
one stranded by a disconnected account or a credit pause would sit there forever
misreporting the campaign as backed up.

MIGRATION FIRST. planJobs() logs loudly and publishes nothing if promo_job is
missing, rather than failing the select and stopping every campaign in silence
the way source_mix did. That is a guard, not the fix — apply
20260819120000_promote_jobs.sql before this deploys.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@ralyodio ralyodio changed the title Reconcile the Promote architecture doc with #205 and #206 Make a Promote publication happen at most once Aug 19, 2026
ralyodio and others added 3 commits August 19, 2026 02:52
The claim predicate compared next_run_at to the exact string we read back. That
is correct only if a timestamptz round-trips to a byte-identical value through
PostgREST, and if it ever did not, the update would match nothing, no campaign
would be claimed, and Promote would stop posting entirely with nothing in the
logs that looks like a failure. That is the same silent-stop shape the
source_mix migration cost us a day for, and it is not worth risking to save a
predicate.

Re-asserting the condition the select already used gives the same atomicity
with none of that exposure: the minimum cadence is 300s, so whoever wins the
claim pushes next_run_at well into the future and the loser's `lte` cannot
match. The scheduling slot the idempotency key is built from is still the
observed next_run_at, so racing sweeps still agree on the slot.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
…mote table

promo_list.user_id references public.profiles(id). Pointing promo_job at
auth.users instead would let a job outlive the profile row the rest of the
feature is keyed to, and would cascade differently from its own campaign.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@ralyodio
ralyodio merged commit e71cb76 into master Aug 19, 2026
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@ralyodio
ralyodio deleted the worktree-promote-arch-refresh branch August 19, 2026 02:56
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