Reduce pre-existing duplicate-code inspection baseline

[shiny-code-bot]

Objective

Reduce or explicitly baseline the remaining file-wide PyCharm duplicate-code warnings in the GitHub helper and regression-test surfaces without broad suppressions or unrelated behavioral changes.

Finish Line

The current duplicate-code findings are either eliminated through maintainable shared helpers or documented as intentional, narrowly scoped accepted debt with reproducible inspection evidence.

Current Status

State: Later, non-blocking; parked pending selection of a focused duplicate-code cluster.
Parked until: a reproducible cluster can be improved without weakening fail-closed behavior or obscuring higher-priority work. No implementation slice is selected by this reconciliation.
Next action: select that bounded slice when this maintenance work is brought into focus.
Last verified: 2026-09-14 UTC; issue scope and current evidence pointers reconciled.

The duplicate-code findings remain pre-existing maintenance debt rather than a correctness, release, or inspection-trust blocker. The completed Trustworthy JetBrains Inspection Evidence milestone does not require this baseline cleanup. The fully retrieved inspection in PR #631 reproduced seven inherited duplicate-code findings; its evidence and triage remain with that PR.

Keep this work separate from #550 and #533. Do not fold broad duplicate-code refactors into contract vendoring, test-value audit, or Astra-study helper repairs. The waiting status records the existing Later decision; it does not create a new dependency or change priority.

Acceptance Criteria

• Reproduce the current warnings with an explicit committed-file PyCharm inspection and record the exact profile/tool revision.
• Separate genuinely duplicated behavior from false-positive structural similarity.
• Refactor only coherent clusters where a shared helper improves clarity and preserves fail-closed semantics.
• Do not add broad suppressions or disable duplicate-code inspection.
• Keep GitHub auth, actor identity, retry, reconciliation, and redaction behavior covered by focused tests.
• Run repository-wide validation and a final explicit-file inspection.

Relationships

• Successor to completed inspection-actionability issue Make JetBrains inspection results actionable for codex-skills #487; do not reopen Make JetBrains inspection results actionable for codex-skills #487 because its scope remains complete.
• Evidence surfaced during merged PRs Add bounded change-impact policy operator commands #548 and Remove hardcoded automation identity defaults #545.

[shiny-code-bot]

PR #635 introduces one deliberately accepted duplicate-code warning in scripts/test_update_pep723_dependencies.py:326: the small callable-test_* runner already used by the execution-environment suite. This is a new warning, not part of the inherited baseline.

Keeping the direct runner avoids adding a shared framework or import surface for a few lines of boilerplate. Opus and Gemini approved this bounded choice. No suppression or inspection-profile change was made; this warning does not select a broader refactor or change this issue's Later status.

Reproducible evidence: exact-file PyCharm 2026.2.2 inspection, profile Codex Skills Readiness, plugin 1.14.1 at 0ceee55dcf76d75b683c1616631f92ae93d0afb9-clean, run 27; source SHA-256 42c60abc567b2aabdfa4376514cbef38c3eeab2f699b0682eeb8075ea53a3d78. Both findings were fresh and fully retrieved. Native verdict remains RED: the other weak warning is the unchanged intentional lambda default capture at line 138. The helper closed its owned project.

The existing 12 tests, failing/passing discovery controls, and full repository gates pass on Python 3.12 and 3.14. The broader #533 audit remains separate.

[shiny-code-bot]

The bounded #533 guard-coverage follow-up adds one cmd_next setup/teardown block that PyCharm flags alongside its existing counterpart in github/scripts/test_gh_plan_next.py (current lines 367-380 and 317-330). This is a new duplicated block, explicitly retained to keep one command-level truncation regression isolated and consistent with the suite. The mutation proof shows that the old suite misses deletion of the truncation guard and the new test catches it on Python 3.12 and 3.14.

Record it with the existing #549 maintenance debt. A later coherent test-fixture cleanup can consolidate the repeated setup if it improves clarity and preserves the same behavioral proof; this test-only slice does not introduce a general harness or rewrite existing tests. No suppression or inspection profile change was made.

Implementation: PR #637, head d5d32558c0d28d1f65304d8007dbd9590afa81d9.