Circular event chain risk

How to fix

1. Break the cycle with a clearer event boundary.
2. Add idempotency and correlation guards.
3. Document intentional event choreography.

What it means

An event handler appears to publish an event that can trigger the original publisher path again.

Why it matters

Circular event chains can create duplicate processing, retry storms, or inconsistent state.

Common causes

• Handlers publish broad follow-up events.
• No idempotency guard exists.
• A workflow was converted from sync calls to events without reviewing cycles.

Example bad pattern

PolicyUpdated triggers RepositoryRevalidated, which triggers PolicyUpdated again.

Example good pattern

Event handlers publish downstream events that do not re-enter the same state transition.

Related files/config

• apps/api/src
• packages/contracts/src

Related CLI commands

• archpilot validate
• archpilot validate --ci