Best possible solution:

Land the shared formatter repair after redacted live Discord progress-draft proof confirms truncated commentary no longer renders a literal leading underscore.

Do we have a high-confidence way to reproduce the issue?

Yes from source inspection, though I did not run a live Discord guild repro in this read-only review. Discord commentary is underscore-wrapped before shared progress-line compaction, and current main only rebalances backticks after truncation.

Is this the best way to solve the issue?

Yes, this is the narrow maintainable fix path: repair the shared compaction boundary where the invalid Markdown is created and cover the important underscore cases. The remaining blocker is proof of the real Discord draft behavior after the patch.

AGENTS.md: found and applied where relevant.

Codex review notes: model gpt-5.5, reasoning high; reviewed against 3b802a7fbc5a.

Label justifications:

• P3: This is a low-severity cosmetic Discord progress-draft formatting fix with focused code changes and no config, migration, auth, or delivery-path change.
• rating: 🧂 unranked krab: Overall readiness is 🧂 unranked krab; proof is 🧂 unranked krab and patch quality is 🐚 platinum hermit.
• status: 📣 needs proof: The PR needs real behavior proof before ClawSweeper can clear the contributor ask. Needs real behavior proof before merge: The PR currently provides local formatter test output only, while the live Discord progress-message edit flow is explicitly untested. After adding proof, update the PR body; ClawSweeper should re-review automatically. If it does not, the PR author or someone with repository write access can comment @clawsweeper re-review.

PR surface:

Source +18, Tests +48. Total +66 across 2 files.

What I checked:

• Repository policy read: Root AGENTS.md and the scoped src/channels and src/plugin-sdk AGENTS.md files were read fully enough to apply the OpenClaw PR review, channel-boundary, SDK-boundary, and real-behavior-proof rules. (AGENTS.md:1, 3b802a7fbc5a)
• Current main source path: Current main compacts every progress draft line and only removes unbalanced inline backticks, so an underscore-wrapped commentary line can lose its closing marker during compaction. (src/channels/streaming.ts:855, 3b802a7fbc5a)
• Discord commentary source path: Discord progress commentary wraps each cleaned commentary line in underscores before the shared progress formatter compacts it, matching the linked issue's root-cause description. (extensions/discord/src/monitor/message-handler.draft-preview.ts:473, 3b802a7fbc5a)
• Preamble routing source path: Discord preamble item events route progress text into pushCommentaryProgress when commentary progress is enabled, which is the runtime entry point for the malformed draft lines. (extensions/discord/src/monitor/message-handler.process.ts:1016, 3b802a7fbc5a)
• Proposed patch shape: The PR head adds removeUnbalancedLeadingItalicMarker, applies it at both compaction return sites, and keeps the existing backtick repair in the same shared formatter path. (src/channels/streaming.ts:863, e8170be59e97)
• Regression coverage: The PR adds cases for dropping a dangling leading italic marker, preserving internal underscores such as test_name, and keeping already-closed leading italic spans. (src/plugin-sdk/channel-streaming.test.ts:350, e8170be59e97)

Likely related people:

• Vincent Koc: Local blame shows commit 91ca036 owns the current shared progress compaction code and Discord commentary underscore wrapping that this PR changes around. (role: recent area contributor; confidence: medium; commits: 91ca03671731; files: src/channels/streaming.ts, extensions/discord/src/monitor/message-handler.draft-preview.ts)

• 🦀 challenger crab: rare, exceptional readiness with strong proof, clean implementation, and convincing validation.
• 🦞 diamond lobster: very strong readiness with only minor maintainer review expected.
• 🐚 platinum hermit: good normal PR, likely mergeable with ordinary maintainer review.
• 🦐 gold shrimp: useful signal, but proof or patch confidence is still limited.
• 🦪 silver shellfish: thin signal; proof, validation, or implementation needs work.
• 🧂 unranked krab: not merge-ready because proof is missing/unusable or there are serious correctness or safety concerns.
• 🌊 off-meta tidepool: rating does not apply to this item.

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