The governing rule is that a submission is the only irreplaceable thing in this pipeline. The photos are often the only copy of an item no longer in the sender's hands, so a missing key, an unreadable file, a failed call and three exhausted retries all end the same way: the item keeps its photos, stays pending, and waits. Nothing in this file deletes anything.
An absent key returns early and spends no attempt. Counting it as a failure would mean a fortnight without a key exhausted the retries and marked every waiting submission failed, with nothing wrong with any of them.
A failure leaves the row queued while tries remain, so the sweeper picks it up again, and failed once they are spent, so a dead submission stops costing money and waits for a person instead of retrying forever.
Photos are read once and passed down rather than loaded again inside the drafting call — the first read already has to happen to check there is at least one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bermudalambandClaude Opus 5
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