Orchestrator agent repeatedly creates duplicate issues despite prompt rules

[genesis-dev-bot]

What went wrong

In ronny-learns-ai, the orchestrator created duplicate task issues in both Milestone 2 and Milestone 3 — 10 issues for 5 tasks each time. A prompt-level hard rule ("search before creating") was added after Milestone 2 but failed to prevent recurrence in Milestone 3.

Root cause

The orchestrator's duplicate search uses title keywords, but the title format changes between runs (e.g., "Task: Your first issue guided lesson" vs "Task: Your first issue lesson page (milestone:3)"). Fuzzy title-based search is unreliable for this guard.

What this project did

Added a deterministic issues.sh check-duplicate command that:

1. Strips common prefixes ("Task: ") and milestone suffixes
2. Searches by core topic words
3. Exits 1 if any matching issues are found

The orchestrator prompt now references this command explicitly.

Proposed framework fix

The genesis issues.sh template (if it exists) should include a check-duplicate subcommand. The seeded orchestrator prompt should reference issues.sh check-duplicate rather than raw gh issue list for pre-creation checks. This makes duplicate prevention deterministic rather than relying on the LLM to craft good search queries.

Affected project: Sayfan-AI/ronny-learns-ai