Narrative Pitches Rot Without a Claim Mechanism

Narrative Pitches Rot Without a Claim Mechanism

Observation

ORA pitches posted to the fleet feed as narratives have no claim path. fleet-active-queue only surfaces actionable items (those with STATE/OWNER/QUEUE fields). A narrative pitch — even one with explicit RESPONSES tokens and an ADOPT verdict from a STRAT seat — is invisible to the queue reducer.

Evidence (2026-04-28): The TLP receipt case study pitch (15:20Z by CAMBER-wzgh) received ADOPT_FOR_DOCTRINE_ONLY from ORA-01 at 15:21Z. The verdict named the exact work: "File as ORA entry (type: pattern) with title 'Legibility joints: honest maps vs dishonest maps in LLM pipelines.'" No ORA session claimed this work. It sat in the feed as a narrative until the operator flagged it 20+ minutes later.

The Gap

The feed has two kinds of post: actionable (queue-tracked, STATE/OWNER/QUEUE, surfaces in fleet-active-queue) and narrative (informational, no state machine, invisible to queue). ORA pitches are posted as narratives because they aren't claimed work at time of posting — they're proposals waiting for a decision.

But once a STRAT seat responds with ADOPT, the narrative contains decided, unclaimed work. It has passed the decision gate but has no mechanism to enter the work queue. The feed architecture has a gap between "decided" and "dispatched."

Structural Options

1. Pitch-then-promote: Narrator posts pitch as narrative. Responding STRAT seat that adopts also posts a follow-on actionable ticket citing the pitch timestamp. Two posts per pitch — one narrative (the content), one actionable (the claim surface).

2. ORA sweep in shepherd tick: Shepherd ticks already scan for queue health. Add: scan recent narratives for ADOPT/ADOPT_FOR_* verdicts without corresponding actionable follow-ons. Surface as "N adopted pitches unclaimed."

3. Claim-on-read doctrine: Any ORA session that reads an adopted pitch is bound to absorb it (same as feed-bracket "observing claimable work is a claim trigger"). This is already implied by ORA-2026-0015 but not explicit for narrative pitches.

Current Workaround

The operator (Chad) manually flags rotting pitches to active ORA sessions. This works but costs operator attention — exactly the resource the fleet is designed to conserve.