Trend analysis of the last 100 issues and PRs: proactive changes to reduce agent backlog #1788

Follow-up to the gap analysis in #1718. This reviews the 100 most recent issues (2026-10-16 to 2026-10-22) and 100 most recent pull requests (2026-10-18 to 2026-10-22) for trends, and proposes proactive changes that remove whole classes of findings rather than individual items.

Volume profile

• Issues: 91 of 100 opened by the Hive agents; 88 closed as completed, 6 closed as not planned, 6 open. Title prefixes: [quality] 43, [architect] 19, [sec-check] 10, [guide] 9, [scanner] 6, [ci-maintainer] 4.
• Pull requests: 73 of 100 opened by the Hive agents; 85 merged, 12 closed unmerged, 3 open. 38 of 100 touch only tests/. Median time to merge 3.4 h, p90 14.1 h.
• hold label: 17 PRs carried it; 6 merged, 8 closed unmerged, 3 still open. Every held PR was a test-only quality PR waiting on the ACMM human-review gate.

Trends and proposed actions

1. Per-file surviving-mutant issues are the dominant class

Since the mutation harness landed (#1731), each source file with survivors receives one issue and one PR (#1760, #1770, #1777, #1781, #1783, #1786). The latest scheduled full-tree run (39556947541) reports 611 survived and 102 no-coverage mutants across 39 files at 82.09 %, so roughly 35 more issue/PR pairs are queued up at the current cadence.

Action: kill the backlog in a handful of grouped PRs by area instead of one file at a time. The nine largest files hold 491 of the 713 remaining mutants:

Once the full tree clears the break score, the scheduled run goes green and the quality agent stops discovering new files.

• Group A: svg-active-content.mjs -- test: kill the surviving mutants in the SVG active content gate #1793 (82.1% to 97.5%)
• Group B: MDX and architecture content (mdx-active-content, architecture-content, architecture-pages, mdx-code-blocks) -- test: kill the surviving mutants in the MDX and architecture content gates #1795 (83.82% to 97.30%)
• Group C: end user data sources (enduser-collector, enduser-assets, enduser-landscape, landscape-source) -- test: kill the surviving mutants in the end user data sources #1789 (80.48% to 93.31%)
• Group D: external sources and safety (cncf-wp-api, github, changelog, git-source, url-safety, uri-safety, project-assets) -- test: kill the surviving mutants in the external source and URL safety helpers #1790 (77.48% to 97.87%)
• Group E: src/ components -- test: kill the surviving mutants in the site components #1794 (89.13% to 99.07%)
• Raise break in stryker.config.mjs -- chore: raise the mutation break threshold to 90 #1799 (break 90; full tree is 96.24% after the group merges, run 39845001035)

Files already covered by open held PRs (#1782 mdx-escape, #1784 profile-image, #1786 validate-utils) are left to those PRs.

2. The hold gate is the bottleneck

Held PRs go stale and get superseded by a later agent PR (#1733 by #1735, #1655 by #1742), which accounts for most of the 12 closed-unmerged PRs. The ACMM level is Hive configuration maintained outside this repository.

Action for Hive maintainers: treat a PR that changes a single tests/*.test.mjs file and passes the mutation workflow as the low-risk class GOVERNANCE.md already describes, and let it merge without a human hold.

3. Architect duplication findings repeat the same shapes

19 [architect] issues report near-duplicates the check:duplication gate does not count: dedup helpers (#1738, #1750, #1766, #1774), freshness styles (#1669, #1681), dialog shells (#1690, #1723), toolbar (#1539, #1658). jscpd only counts exact clones at or above minTokens.

Action: lower minTokens and minLines in .jscpd.json once, run a single sweep of what surfaces, then lower the ceilings in scripts/check-duplication.mjs to the new baseline.

4. Documentation drift

9 [guide] issues report stale script, route or workflow names; CONTRIBUTING.md changed in 16 of 100 PRs and AGENTS.md in 8.

Action: extend the markdown reference test so every npm run <script> and every workflow name mentioned in a *.md file must exist in package.json or .github/workflows/.

5. Reopened and misfolded issues

Two issues had to be reopened (#1736, #1764) after a Hive agent folded an unrelated finding into them or a PR auto-closed them on an incidental mention.

Action: keep using Refs rather than closing keywords for partial PRs, and ask the Hive maintainers to stop folding findings on filename overlap alone.

Suggested order

2 (unblocks everything else), then 1 (removes the largest future stream), then 3 and 4 (each removes a class). Items 2 and 5 are Hive-side configuration and need the Hive maintainers rather than a PR here.