Backlog sync

bernstein sync reconciles the file-backed backlog under .sdd/backlog/ with the running task server: it creates a server task for every backlog file that isn't tracked yet, and moves the backlog files for finished tasks out of the way. It exists for the case where backlog .yaml / .md files were hand-authored or edited on disk (by a human or an agent) and need to be picked up without restarting the orchestrator.

The command is registered but hidden from bernstein --help (hidden=True on the Click command); it is fully functional and safe to invoke directly.

Usage

bernstein sync
bernstein sync --port 8052 --dir .

Flag	Default	Meaning
--port	8052	Task server port. The command talks to http://127.0.0.1:<port>.
--dir	.	Project root directory (parent of .sdd/).

Requires a reachable task server; if the server can't be reached the command reports "Cannot connect to task server - is it running?" and continues without creating tasks.

What it does

1. Scans .sdd/backlog/open/*.yaml, .sdd/backlog/open/*.md, and .sdd/backlog/issues/*.yaml / *.md.

2. For each file, parses a BacklogTask (title, role, priority, scope, complexity, description) and checks it against every task already on the server (queried across open, claimed, in_progress, done, failed, and cancelled status). A file is considered already-synced if its normalised title or a slug derived from its filename matches an existing server task's normalised title.

3. New tasks are submitted in one batch via POST /tasks/batch; if the server doesn't support batching (404), the command falls back to creating them one at a time via POST /tasks. The originating filename is appended to each task's description as <!-- source: <file> --> for traceability.

4. For tasks that have reached done, failed, or cancelled on the server, the matching backlog file is moved out of .sdd/backlog/open/ or .sdd/backlog/claimed/ into .sdd/backlog/closed/.

   Note: the command's own --help text and its terminal summary line both say the file moves to backlog/done/. The directory .sdd/backlog/done/ is in fact created by the command, but nothing is ever written into it — the real move target, per _move_completed_files in core/persistence/sync.py, is .sdd/backlog/closed/. Look there, not in done/, for files after a sync.

5. Prints a summary: how many tasks were created, how many files were skipped as already-synced, how many were moved to closed/, and any per-file errors (unparseable file, failed HTTP call).

Deduplication

Matching is fuzzy on purpose, so a backlog file surviving a rename doesn't get re-submitted as a duplicate task:

• Title match: the file's parsed title, lower-cased and slugified, is compared against every existing server task's title, slugified the same way.
• Filename match: the filename itself (numeric/priority prefixes like 115- or p0_c1_030426_feat_ stripped, extension stripped) is compared the same way, to catch files whose title text has since drifted from what the server task was created with.

Source

src/bernstein/cli/commands/task_cmd.py (sync, hidden Click command), src/bernstein/core/persistence/sync.py (sync_backlog_to_server, BacklogTask, SyncResult) — reachable at runtime via the back-compat alias bernstein.core.sync.