Queue Selection and Claim Lifecycle

This is the complete normative Step 2 contract for vault-ingress. Execute normalization before claiming, and preserve every generation, freshness, replay, and recovery rule below.

Declared cloud-placeholder evidence blocks a fresh claim even when another source is usable. Follow the download inventory and owner hydration procedure in Source Identity Preflight. Automatic selection leaves affected talks unclaimed and reports cloud_artifacts; an explicitly named affected talk rejects the batch without changing the database. Legacy cloud-only talks keep their prior status during normalization instead of becoming skipped_no_sources. The final claim reassesses readiness before writing the lease. Replaying an existing claim does not create fresh evidence authority.

Fresh queue work uses claim schema v7. Before changing any talk status, queue-state.py claim snapshots one immutable adherence_baseline for the entire selected batch, stamps required_return_schema_version: 7, and copies that exact snapshot into every member claim. The snapshot uses the current catalog fingerprint and pattern-scoring schema, includes only current processed/processed_partial talks, and excludes every active-batch filename before inspecting its prior score. Its as_of equals the claim's canonical claimed_at; do not edit or recompute it after the claim is written.

• Run "{python_path}" "{speaker_toolkit_root}/skills/vault-ingress/scripts/queue-state.py" {vault_root}/tracking-database.json normalize once. This one copy-on-write command migrates legacy skipped_no_video/skipped_no_transcript states from the talk's usable source capabilities. The shared root-aware assessor must actually read and validate a local transcript/deck/PDF before it counts; a non-empty or missing path is not a capability. Declared remote video/slide acquisition remains eligible for a claim-time download. A transcript_source provenance label alone is not capability. Only a record with no verified local source or remote acquisition path becomes skipped_no_sources. The same command uses the shared exact-generation selector to requeue valid processed/processed_partial results that cannot enter the active pattern cohort. For scoring v5, exact generation identity is necessary but insufficient: the shared freshness assessor also re-hashes every persisted source-located artifact against the database's vault and configured source roots. Missing, replaced, or otherwise drifted evidence is excluded and requeued. Transcript freshness also revalidates the hash-bound quality policy against current owner/provider duration; source- identity drift cannot leave a previously accepted partial transcript in the cohort. Its normalizations report carries ordered reason codes, deterministic freshness details where applicable, and the stored reprocess_reason for each changed row. Malformed current-generation identity or score lanes reject the complete command without writing; inflight, pending, already-queued, and skipped records are not generation-normalized. A repeated successful normalization with no new drift leaves the DB bytes unchanged. Completed claims remain immutable evidence on the requeued talk and move to history normally when a later claim is created.
• Claim each exact batch through queue-state.py ... claim --run-id <stable-run> --batch-id <stable-batch> --now <timezone-aware-ISO>. The command selects pending, needs-reprocessing, and retryable download failures, writes an atomic lease, increments reprocess_generation, and returns the claimed talk list. Every fresh claim is schema v7 and requires return schema v7. Never change a record to reprocessing-inflight by hand.
• Before claiming a non-YouTube talk whose transcript will be used as evidence, acquire the transcript and register its canonical vault-relative transcript_path through the guarded source-repair workflow. A worker-returned path cannot grant citation authority to that same return.
• Repeating the same live/completed run and batch is an idempotent replay: use the exact stored claims and baseline, and do not rewrite the DB. Recover an expired or stranded lease with queue-state.py ... recover; recovery keeps the saved snapshot in claim history. A later claim creates a new generation and takes a fresh pre-mutation snapshot rather than editing or reusing the old generation's baseline.
• Set slide_source per the PPTX → PDF → video extraction → none hierarchy in SKILL.md. Mark "skipped_no_sources" only if preflight confirms that transcript, slide, and video sources are all unavailable.
• If $ARGUMENTS specifies a talk filename or title, process ONLY that one.