docs: add goal 0026 — request lifecycle honesty (withdrawal + staleness)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01FYwojT8GdUbYSoggbvEFft

Author: alicoding

docs/goals/0026-request-lifecycle-honesty.md

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+# 0026 — Request lifecycle honesty: withdrawal + staleness
+
+## Goal
+A pending decision never lies about its relevance (owner-observed
+2026-08-11: a 4-hour-old test write sat in Review looking as urgent as
+a fresh ask — "feels like I missed something / it's not working").
+An actionable item must carry its freshness, and the requester must be
+able to take back a request that stopped mattering.
+
+## Plan
+1. [ ] **`cancel_write` MCP tool** (the missing fourth verb —
+   park/poll/resolve/WITHDRAW; `tasks/cancel` in the MCP Tasks spec is
+   the direct precedent ADR-0032 already mirrors): the requesting
+   client cancels its own still-pending write by id; cancelled ≠
+   denied (a distinct outcome, recorded in Activity like
+   denied/expired — never traceless). Ungated (cancelling your own
+   request needs no human approval; it only ever REDUCES pending
+   work). At-most-once semantics shared with resolve.
+2. [ ] **Staleness presentation** in Review + banner + floating
+   prompt: age-tiered treatment (fresh <15m renders as-is; older gets
+   a visible age emphasis + "expires in Nh" from the 24h clock) — the
+   §1 thesis applied to time-honesty of asks. No auto-dismiss of
+   actionable items (the VS Code severity rule holds; expiry is the
+   only terminal timer).
+3. [ ] **Requester liveness hint** (design question, research first):
+   should a pending write surface "requester last polled Nm ago" —
+   check_write_status calls are the natural heartbeat — so an
+   abandoned request is visibly abandoned? Cheap to record; decide
+   presentation against the no-noise bar.
+4. [ ] Session-side hygiene rule for THIS workflow (rides the memory,
+   not Mill): a test write parked for demonstration gets cancelled by
+   its requester when the demonstration ends.
+5. [ ] **Badge staleness on write resolution (BUG, diagnosed live
+   2026-08-11)**: ResolveMCPWrite (and the expiry sweep) never emits on
+   the pending-changed channel, so the sidebar badge held a phantom 1
+   against an empty queue — resolution paths must ping the same ONE
+   signal parks do (goal 0005's model, missing emit).
+6. [ ] **Resolved writes appear in Review's Recently-resolved** — today
+   a denied/approved/cancelled write vanishes from Review entirely
+   (only trace: session-only Activity, gone on restart). The queue's
+   own history must include write resolutions, durably (the persisted
+   24h outcome records already exist — surface them).
+7. [ ] **Activity MCP-write rows get actions**: expandable detail +
+   jump-to-the-target-workflow (runs already drill down; writes are
+   action-dead — owner: "so what I can do and nothing I can do").
+8. [ ] **Stuck-ENQUEUED runs surface honestly** (a run enqueued-forever
+   reads as live; found: a zombie ENQUEUED run from a morning error) —
+   age-visible like item 2, plus a Stop affordance where cancel is
+   legal.
+
+## Acceptance
+A parked-then-obsolete request can be withdrawn by its requester and
+shows as cancelled in Activity; a lingering pending item visibly
+communicates its age and time-to-expiry; the owner never again reads
+staleness as breakage.