`migrate ids` can renumber the published claimant, breaking references it never scans

When two files claim an ID, runMigrateIds sorts the claimants by path and keeps the first (plugins/plan/src/commands/migrate-ids.ts:165). Which claimant is already published on the base ref plays no part, so on a branch the tool will happily renumber the entity that is already on main and leave the local draft holding the ID.

The safety argument for that choice is stated in the code:

claude/nifty-ptolemy-80epot View source

Relationships

ID:SPEC-135Status:shipped

Validation surfaces beyond the build

ID:WORK-582Status:done

Prevent duplicate plan IDs pre-merge, and resolve them when provable

Priority:mediumComplexity:moderateMilestone:v0.36.0

ID:v0.38.0Status:complete

v0.38.0 — Rune transform consolidation

ID:WORK-607Status:ready

plan migrate ids treats an ID present on the base ref as fixed

Priority:mediumComplexity:simpleMilestone:v0.38.0

claude/nifty-ptolemy-80epot current confirmed

claude/v0-37-post-release-plan-dc3va1 fixed main confirmed

Sep 23, 09:11 AMb5f211d
Created (confirmed)by bjornolofandersson

Where it comes from

referencePatterns and lineReferences are correct and thorough for what they are given. The gap is the corpus, not the matcher: the loop that collects ambiguousRefs never looks beyond the plan directory.

Measured on this repo

IDs matching (SPEC|WORK|BUG|ADR)-\d{3} outside plan/, excluding node_modules and dist:

File	Refs	Reachable after a renumber?
`site/content/_data/rune-attributes.json`	718	generated — regenerable
`site/content/releases.md`	224	in-repo — fixable, but unscanned
`packages/runes/CHANGELOG.md`	130	published to npm — permanent
`packages/transform/CHANGELOG.md`	120	published
`packages/lumina/CHANGELOG.md`	80	published
`packages/content/CHANGELOG.md`	51	published
`packages/runes/src/config.ts`	54	in-repo source comments

The changelog rows are the ones that cannot be walked back. A released entry reads:

- f1908a3: An entity with no properties is not emitted (WORK-567, SPEC-130 D4)

Renumber SPEC-130 and that line, in a tarball already on the registry, now names a spec about something else. Nothing in the repository records that it went stale.

The asymmetry the tool is missing

"Which claimant should keep the ID is not knowable from the files alone" is true of two files in a working tree. It stops being true the moment a base ref is available, and plan validate --against <ref> already establishes exactly that fact:

An ID present on the base ref is already distributed — merged commits, PR bodies, changelogs, release notes, other branches in flight. Renumbering it invalidates references the tool cannot see and cannot fix.
An ID only on the branch has been seen by nobody. Renumbering it invalidates nothing.

So the choice is not arbitrary and does not need a tiebreak. It needs the base ref the sibling command already takes.

Path-sort is also worse than a coin flip here, because it correlates with the slug. In the case that surfaced this, the local draft won the keep slot purely because collapse-the-rune-transform-boilerplate sorts before pluggable-query-engines-for-the-field-value-grammar.

Steps to Reproduce

Branch from main.
Create a spec locally that takes the next free ID — say SPEC-138.
Meanwhile main lands its own SPEC-138 (this is the ordinary race; it is why --against exists).
Merge main into the branch. plan validate reports the duplicate.
Run refrakt plan migrate ids.

Expected

The entity that is new on this branch is the one renumbered; the ID already reachable on the base ref is left alone. Failing that — with no base ref to consult — the tool says it cannot tell which claimant is published and refuses, rather than picking by filename.

Actual

Scanned 827 plan files in plan/
  Would renumber 1 entit(y/ies):
    SPEC-138 → SPEC-140   specs/SPEC-138-pluggable-query-engines-for-the-field-value-grammar.md
      collides with specs/SPEC-138-collapse-the-rune-transform-boilerplate.md

pluggable-query-engines is the one already merged to main. Applying this would have renamed a published spec and left the unpublished draft holding SPEC-138.

Notes

Verified by hand on branch claude/nifty-ptolemy-80epot; the draft was renumbered manually to SPEC-140 instead, and plan validate --against origin/main then reported no collisions across 791 ids.
In that instance nothing referenced either ID yet, so the outcome was recoverable. The severity is that it is not detectably unrecoverable: the tool reports the same confident plan whether or not the ID it is about to move appears in a published changelog.
The existing test does not pin the current behaviour. picks which file moves deterministically (plugins/plan/test/migrate-ids.test.ts:113) asserts only that two runs agree, not which file moves. A fix that changes the selection rule leaves it passing.
Related but distinct from the refusal path, which is working as designed: this is about the case where the tool proceeds.
A narrower fix — refuse whenever more than one claimant exists and no base ref was given — is strictly safer than today and needs no new plumbing, at the cost of the convenience the command was written for.

References

SPEC-135 — duplicate-ID detection, prevention and resolution; D8 is the "resolve only when provable" rule this narrows
WORK-582 — the work item that built migrate ids and validate --against