afk-pipeline recap phase: two distinct publish failures in one day (OAuth session limit; MDX acorn-parse 422) — harden the phase

[JorgeMenaDev]

Note

Triage status 2026-07-12 (verified vs origin/main, afk-pipeline v2.13.1)
Fixed since filing: recap is now a separate job with continue-on-error: true (never burns the implement job) and opt-in — briefs stamp recap: off by default (v2.9.3, 896b405); authoring writes recap-source.json to disk instead of structured-output extraction; three MDX guardrails live in templates/sandcastle/recap/mdx-authoring-rules.md.
Remaining scope of this issue: (1) pre-publish local MDX compile + one self-repair round (a publish 422 still just fails the job); (2) explicit raw-{/}-in-prose acorn rule; (3) session-limit-distinct skipped_quota note; (4) in-job retry for transient connection drops (per the 2026-07-07 comment). recap.ts is single-pass, exit 1 on no URL.

Observed on Arketix/acredix, 2026-07-05, both on the local lane at v2.2.x:

1. Run 28742075548 (issue seo-v4 slice 3e: affiliate/promo integrity (#40) #68): recap agent died on You've hit your session limit · resets 4:10pm (UTC) — the CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN quota. Phase correctly reported failure, but a quota error is retryable-later by nature; today it just burns the job.
2. Run 28749642800 (issue seo-v4 slice 6a: offline link-graph analyzer (#35) #71): recap authored MDX the Plan app rejects — create-visual-recap failed 422 Unprocessable Entity: {\"error\":\"Could not parse expression with acorn\"} — i.e. a JSX expression syntax error in authored content. Sibling failure mode to the empty-Screen 422 already guarded in mdx-authoring-rules.md (andesphere PR seo-growth-workspace: add optional geo-grid measurement for local rankings #33).

Suggested hardening (evidence-driven, pick what's cheap):

• Pre-publish MDX validation step in the recap job: compile/parse the authored MDX locally (acorn/mdx compile) BEFORE calling recap publish; on parse failure, feed the error back to the agent for one self-repair round instead of failing the job.
• Add an authoring rule to mdx-authoring-rules.md: no raw {/} in prose, expressions must be valid JS (the acorn error class).
• Optional: detect the session-limit string and emit a distinct skipped_quota issue note (parallel to skipped_no_engine) so consumers know it's retryable.

Both PRs shipped fine without recap (best-effort held), but 2/3 recap runs failing on one repo in one day is a phase-health signal.

[JorgeMenaDev]

Another recap-phase transient (2026-07-07, andyChat run 28888475402, slice-4 media PR #294): API Error: Connection closed mid-response from claude-code on the recap VM — third distinct transient failure mode for this best-effort job (OAuth session limit, MDX 422, now connection drop). Strengthens the case for a simple in-job retry (1 retry, fresh session) before giving up.