feat: pulse CI failure pattern detection — close self-improvement gap from GH#2973

[marcusquinn]

Summary

Adds CI failure pattern detection to the pulse supervisor (Step 3 of pulse.md), closing the self-improvement gap that allowed GH#2973 to go undetected.

Problem

The pulse processed PRs individually without correlating CI failures across them. When the same workflow check failed on all 10 open PRs (opencode-agent regex false positive + review-bot-gate concurrency cancellation), the pulse either:

• Dispatched workers to "fix" individual PRs (useless — the bug was in the workflow YAML, not the PR code)
• Ignored the failures because mergeStateStatus: UNSTABLE wasn't actionable

The self-improvement signals in AGENTS.md already mentioned "Multiple PRs fail CI with the same error pattern" as a signal, but the pulse had no implementation to actually detect this.

Fix

Added a new subsection "CI failure pattern detection" to pulse.md Step 3 that instructs the pulse agent to:

1. Correlate failing check names across all open PRs in each repo
2. Identify checks failing on 3+ PRs as likely systemic (workflow bugs, not per-PR code issues)
3. File a single issue for systemic failures instead of dispatching N workers
4. Continue dispatching workers for per-PR failures as before

This is guidance for the LLM agent (not a deterministic script), consistent with the "Intelligence Over Determinism" principle — the pulse agent reads check names, correlates across PRs, and uses judgment to distinguish systemic from per-PR failures.

Related

• GH#2973 — the bug this would have caught (fixed in PR fix: resolve CI check failures on all PRs — regex false positive + concurrency #2974)
• Cross-session memory stored for future reference

Closes #2975

Summary by CodeRabbit

Documentation

• Added guidance for detecting and handling systemic CI failures, improving issue triage and resolution workflows.

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🔍 Code Quality Report

�[0;35m[MONITOR]�[0m Code Review Monitoring Report

�[0;34m[INFO]�[0m Latest Quality Status:
SonarCloud: 0 bugs, 0 vulnerabilities, 108 code smells

�[0;34m[INFO]�[0m Recent monitoring activity:
Fri Mar 6 04:53:30 UTC 2026: Code review monitoring started
Fri Mar 6 04:53:31 UTC 2026: SonarCloud - Bugs: 0, Vulnerabilities: 0, Code Smells: 108

📈 Current Quality Metrics

• BUGS: 0
• CODE SMELLS: 108
• VULNERABILITIES: 0

Generated on: Fri Mar 6 04:53:33 UTC 2026

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Generated by AI DevOps Framework Code Review Monitoring

[coderabbitai]

Caution

Review failed

Pull request was closed or merged during review

Walkthrough

Documentation is added to pulse.md outlining CI failure pattern detection: identifying systemic failures when the same check fails across 3+ open PRs, distinguishing them from per-PR failures, and prescribing workflow actions (halt dispatch, file issues, apply labels).

Changes

Cohort / File(s)	Summary
CI Failure Pattern Detection Documentation .agents/scripts/commands/pulse.md	New subsection documenting systemic CI failure detection logic, including identification criteria, examples of systemic vs. per-PR failures, and prescribed handling steps.

Estimated code review effort

🎯 1 (Trivial) | ⏱️ ~3 minutes

Possibly related PRs

• feat: add self-improvement principle and agent routing to pulse system #2295 — Modifies pulse.md to expand observe outcomes/self-improvement logic for detecting systemic CI failures across PRs; directly aligned with this documentation addition
• fix: add mandatory OPEN state check before dispatching workers #2455 — Adds failure-detection and dispatch-guard patterns to pulse.md; overlaps with the systemic failure handling guidance introduced here
• t1346: fix agents looking for workflows/pulse.md — use full path scripts/commands/pulse.md #2459 — Updates references to pulse.md file path; maintains consistency with documentation file location

Poem

🔄 Three failures make a pattern clear,
Systemic bugs we'll spot, not fear,
One issue filed beats workers in vain,
The pulse now sees through CI's rain. ✨

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The PR title clearly and specifically describes the main change: adding CI failure pattern detection to the pulse supervisor to close a gap identified in GH#2973.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	The PR fully implements all coding requirements from #2975: adds CI failure pattern detection subsection to pulse.md Step 3 that instructs the pulse agent to correlate failing checks across PRs, identify systemic failures (3+ PRs), and file single issues for systemic vs dispatch workers for per-PR failures.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	All changes are scoped to pulse.md documentation additions directly supporting the CI failure pattern detection objective from #2975; no unrelated modifications introduced.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check.

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✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Post copyable unit tests in a comment
• Commit unit tests in branch feature/pulse-ci-pattern-detection

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[sonarqubecloud]

Quality Gate passed

Issues
0 New issues
0 Accepted issues

Measures
0 Security Hotspots
0.0% Coverage on New Code
0.0% Duplication on New Code

See analysis details on SonarQube Cloud