The communication thread can own the conversation, with a GitHub Issue owning tracked work only when one exists. The controller owns execution records: event deduplication, agent-spec revision, session/run IDs, scheduling, cancellation, and reply delivery. It should not create a second task board.

Keep work authority outside the controller

This revises the earlier shortlist in light of the Operator's preference. A discussion can invite an agent without first creating an issue. If a GitHub Issue is attached, GitHub owns that issue's title, assignment, and status; the communication layer remains the conversation record. The controller keeps a technical ledger for event IDs, invocation and authorization, source thread/issue references, agent spec revision, agent session, run, runtime resource, retries, cancellation, and outgoing reply delivery. A run's state is not another user-facing task status.

Suggested event path: an explicit invocation arrives through the communication adapter; the controller verifies who may invoke which agent and read which context; it deduplicates the source event; it launches a run from a pinned agent definition; it posts progress or a question to the original thread; on completion it records the run outcome and replies there. When an issue exists, link to it. Do not silently create one. A later message in the same discussion may resume the agent session with a new run, while cancellation targets the active run. This preserves the earlier distinction among discussion, task, session, run, and runtime IDs in the identity model.

Candidate correction. Paperclip is built around its own Issues and comments: its CLI prompt creates an Issue by default; a Slack mentioned thread maps to a Paperclip task; a GitHub issue mention also creates a Paperclip task. Its company export/import is useful for portability, but does not remove this second work record. It drops from the primary controller shortlist under the new requirement. Sources: https://docs.paperclip.ing/reference/cli/prompt/ ; https://docs.paperclip.ing/connectors/slack/ ; https://docs.paperclip.ing/connectors/github/ ; https://docs.paperclip.ing/guides/power/export-import/

Hatchet or Temporal can instead hold internal workflow/run state behind a small controller. Hatchet supports event routing and input-derived idempotency keys. Temporal's Signal-with-Start can address a long-lived session by stable ID; duplicate message IDs still need application-level deduplication. Sources: https://docs.hatchet.run/v1/cel-expressions ; https://docs.temporal.io/design-patterns/signal-with-start

This is an architectural proposal and documentation-based evaluation, not a deployed integration test.