The stale-claim reclaimer added earlier in this branch un-claimed every timed-out
row, including SYNCHRONOUS ones. `reply_to.is_some()` is the schema's "never
retry" signal (0009_outbox.sql) and the dispatcher honours it: those rows are an
HTTP request someone is blocked on, and re-running one means re-running its side
effects — a charge, an email, an external POST — for a caller that is long gone.
So a dispatcher dying mid-sync-dispatch would have its row resurrected 10 minutes
later and executed a second time, for nobody. Before the reclaimer those rows were
merely stranded; the reclaimer turned inert into harmful.
The reclaim now gates on `reply_to IS NULL`. Stale sync rows are DELETED instead:
they can never be dispatched again and nobody is waiting on them, so leaving them
would just accumulate garbage.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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