[Jammy2211]

Summary

Closes #274. Third instance of one family: a conductor derives a value from prose and ignores the header key the author declared. (1) the Feature Agent's ranker — fixed, #217; (2) the Bug Agent, over a declared Type: bug; (3) the Intake Agent, over a declared Difficulty:.

Intake never read a declared difficulty at all. analyse() hand-built the prompt-shaped dict it passes the sizing faculty, omitting the declared_header() keys the file-loading path folds in — so estimate_difficulty ran with no declared key present, nothing reconciled derived against declared, and the derived level was persisted into the header, silently replacing what the input asked for. Reported case: raw text declaring Difficulty: medium filed as too-large (score 11), unchanged when the full header block was prepended, hand-corrected after --apply.

That matters because the heuristic's biggest input is prompt length, which is a bad size proxy — a prompt is long when it carries a design and the sibling tasks' traps, not when the work is large. Declaring a level is the documented escape hatch for exactly that inversion (complete/2026/08/feature-ranker-ignores-header-keys.md), and on this path it did nothing.

Per the prompt, the precedence rule moves into the sizing faculty — the one place all three conductors already call — rather than being re-implemented per conductor. Three reconciliations were three chances to forget one, and two forgot.

API Changes

• _sizing.effective_difficulty(p) — the single precedence rule (moved from _feature.py): declared wins, derived level + score returned alongside so a disagreement is reported rather than silently resolved.
• _sizing.declared_header now also reads Type: and Autonomy:; new _sizing.declared_inline reads the same keys out of unheadered conception prose, and _sizing.strip_declarations keeps a declaration out of a derived title.
• _feature.effective_difficulty is gone — imported from the faculty instead. Behaviour identical.
• BugDecision gains difficulty_declared / difficulty_derived / difficulty_disagreement; IntakeDecision gains those plus difficulty_source / work_type_source / autonomy_source / priority_source.

See full details below.

Test Plan

• pytest tests/ -q → 491 passed (15 new in tests/test_declared_header_precedence.py)
• Tenant-firewall leg: repos_sync.py --check --only "tenant firewall (organ code)" → OK
• The reported case, end to end: intake classify --file on the bug prompt now reports Work-type: bug (declared) and Difficulty: medium (declared) — it previously classified it feature and re-sized it
• intake "… Difficulty large, supervised." (the ideas.md idiom) → large (declared; heuristic derived small), and the clause no longer leaks into the title or filename
• pyauto-brain feature / bug on the same prompt report the declared level with the derived one alongside

Full API Changes (for automation & release notes)

Added

• _sizing.effective_difficulty(p) -> (level, score, factors, derived_level) — declared-wins precedence over estimate_difficulty.
• _sizing.declared_inline(text) -> (fields, spans) — declarations in unheadered prose (Difficulty: medium mid-sentence; the ideas.md idiom Difficulty large, supervised.). Code fences and inline spans are masked first, matching declared_header — a prompt quoting a header is documenting it, not declaring it.
• _sizing.strip_declarations(text, spans) — declaration-free text for title derivation only; prompt bodies stay verbatim.
• _sizing.AUTONOMY_LEVELS.

Changed

• _sizing.declared_header returns declared_type and declared_autonomy alongside the existing keys; _HEADER_KEY_RE widened to type|autonomy.
• _bug.analyse_bug / _bug.select_bug size through effective_difficulty; _bug.re_home_check returns None when the prompt declares Type: bug (a defect report legitimately says "refactor" or "documentation" while describing a crash).
• _intake.analyse reads both declaration sources (header lines win a tie), sizes through effective_difficulty, honours a declared Type: over the prose classifier, and derives its title from the declaration-stripped text. _intake._derive_fields (the formalise path) takes the same route.

Removed

• _feature.effective_difficulty — moved to the faculty and imported (_feature.effective_difficulty still resolves through the star-free import, so callers are unaffected).

Migration

• None. No caller-visible signature changed; the only behaviour change is that a declared key is now honoured where it was previously discarded.

Gate

Heart is not reachable from this session (web-github; PyAutoHeart is not among the session's repos), so ship_library's documented fallback applies: the repo's own suite is the gate — 491 passed, plus the tenant-firewall leg CI also runs.

Generated by the PyAutoLabs agent workflow.

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