Critic: leased handoff keeps code review alive offline — SkimNews
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- Critic added a leased handoff in agentQuestions.ts so the website can enqueue questions while every author device is offline, turning a best-effort queue into atomic claim-based work distribution.
- The 45-second lease guarantees exactly one device owns a question at a time and returns the work to the pool if the claiming device disconnects, instead of losing the thread.
- Session transcripts stay on the machine that created them, so the original coding session remains the source of context even when a different device picks up the question.
- The project-anchor matching now treats exact blobs as definitive wins, while close rename or surrounding-context candidates are scored and surfaced as ambiguous rather than silently attached to the wrong line.
- The new agent-question-status UI shows which device is answering and turns a stale lease into a 'Reconnecting' state by reading the lease the queue already stores, with no extra query.
Why it matters: The update removes the prior assumption that an author must be online to receive a code-review question, turning review threads into durable work that survives dropped connections and closed laptops. For teams running Critic, reviews no longer die mid-thread, and conservative anchor matching surfaces ambiguous matches rather than silently attaching a review to the wrong line.
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